“Mother!”

“Candide!”

Iette pulled her daughter into her arms and smiled brightly.

Candide, whom she hadn’t seen in a while, laughed cheerfully like a bright young girl despite being married. Infected by that laughter, everyone smiled as they watched mother and daughter.

Killian commended the attendants who had brought Candide and Lacey all this way and sent them off. This small mansion didn’t have space to accommodate them as well.

“Mother, I came too.”

“Lacey…”

The face that pushed past his younger sister looked embarrassed yet eager for his mother’s attention. When those calm green eyes, more composed than Candide’s, turned toward Iette, she no longer found Lacey unfamiliar.

“Welcome, Lacey.”

When Iette opened her arms, Lacey awkwardly squeezed himself into her embrace and smiled.

Iette, who had learned Marshal Crétien—Lacey’s—true identity from Killian, had called for Valide in shock. He was the only one who knew best about her time as “Iette le Fleur.”

According to Valide’s investigation, Iette had one more child besides Candide—a son. But that child, being a boy, had been taken to England by his grandfather, Marquis Fleur.

His whereabouts after that were unknown, and since Iette’s memories showed no signs of returning, Valide had forgotten about it too.

Learning the full truth, Iette had contacted her son Lacey, and he had rushed to this distant mansion in tears.

According to what she heard from Lacey, he’d grown up constantly hearing his grandfather Marquis Fleur badmouth his parents. His father was a pathetic man who always caused trouble with gambling and women, and his mother was also an irresponsible, foolish country woman—he was told to always be wary of them and study hard.

Separated from his parents at a young age, Lacey had lived believing only those words. But the moment he learned the Empress of Sainte-Valion was his mother. The moment he saw she had abandoned him and built a happy new family with only his younger sister.

Lacey had come to Sainte-Valion to take revenge on the mother who abandoned him. And he had joined the anti-Empress faction, waiting only for the day to take revenge on Iette.

As a nobleman from Angloria who showed loyalty to Killian and caught his eye, he had achieved great merit with his outstanding abilities, becoming a marshal at a young age. Killian had strangely favored this Lacey. Enough to arrange a marriage proposal with his own younger sister.

Now it all made sense. Killian nodded as he watched mother and son holding each other. Though they looked nothing alike, those eyes—that emerald green—were exactly the same.

If it had been anyone else, he wouldn’t have allowed them into Iette’s embrace, but he was lenient with Lacey.

“Let’s go inside and continue talking. You must all be tired from coming all this way.”

Killian treated Iette’s children like his own blood, looking after them in a way unlike himself.

Understanding his heart well, Candide smiled with a smile resembling Iette’s and linked arms with Killian. Father and daughter entered inside, looking at each other warmly. Mother and son followed behind them.

A place had been prepared in the garden blooming with roses. There, the family never lost their smiles as they ate tea and snacks.

“Soon Candide will have to leave for where she married. Then there won’t be opportunities like this anymore. I’ll miss you so much.”

Iette felt this might be the last chance to gather with her children.

Candide, who had married the son of a German prince-elector, would soon have to leave for that place. If that happened, it would be difficult for all four of them to be in one place.

Having watched Candide grow up since birth, Iette was surprised at how much time had already passed, yet also felt the grip of a fate she couldn’t escape.

Napoleon’s Empress Josephine, and her two children Eugène and Hortense. Eugène married the daughter of the Bavarian Elector.

The couple got along very well, and one of their children married into the Swedish royal family, their blood continuing in Sweden even now. And Hortense married Napoleon’s younger brother and gave birth to Napoleon III, though the couple’s relationship was very poor.

Thinking Candide was Hortense, Iette had devoted herself to her daughter’s marriage. She had barely managed to prevent the marriage that would have been with Killian’s younger brother, but…

“Really, Mother. He promised he’d never stop me from visiting you. Rather, he keeps pestering me to ask about his country’s affairs on his behalf—it’s annoying.”

Hearing Candide grumble about her husband, Iette smiled strangely. Perhaps because they had fallen for each other at a chance meeting, the couple seemed to get along well. That was fortunate, but…

Unlike actual history, the twisted marriage gave Iette a headache. Lacey marrying Killian’s younger sister, and Candide marrying the son of the Bavarian Elector.

She was curious about the future that had become unknowable, but she knew it was no longer her domain. While deciding to leave the future to her children, Iette still looked at them with worry.

She knew her daughter had chosen her husband according to her own decision, but knowing what kind of person her son-in-law was, Iette couldn’t feel at ease.

Ludwig I of the Kingdom of Bavaria. The man who married Candide was anti-French and famous for holding the games that became the origin of Oktoberfest, Germany’s festival. But above all, Iette remembered him as a lecher who created a gallery of beauties in his palace, so she worried about her daughter’s future.

“Don’t worry. I’m keeping a good watch so he can’t do anything foolish.”

“Right. If he does anything foolish, tell me. I’ll go take care of him immediately.”

Killian spoke menacingly to Candide, who smiled brightly to ease her mother’s worries. With Killian, the Hegemon of the Continent, as a father-in-law, the son-in-law probably couldn’t even dream of philandering in this world.

Now Iette looked at Lacey. She worried about Lacey too, who had married Killian’s younger sister instead of the wife he would have lived happily ever after with originally.

“Don’t worry about me either. My wife and I get along reasonably well.”

Lacey spoke firmly, seemingly cutting off such worries at the source. Instead of Iette, who had no choice but to believe those words, Killian interjected.

“If that guy does anything foolish, tell me too. When I scold him like when he was young, he comes back to his senses.”

When Killian got involved, all problems became simple, so the other family members could only laugh brightly.

Putting worries aside, the family who met after a long time shared a meal with bright faces. But the time to part came quickly.

“I should be going now. President Lambert told me I must attend tomorrow morning’s meeting.”

Unfortunately, Lacey stood up, saying he couldn’t spend the night and had to leave.

With Killian and Iette gone, Lambert and Lacey were struggling to fill their positions. Lambert, who had become President with the citizens’ support, was sending letters to Iette in tears every day.

“Ah… you’re both really working so hard.”

Knowing that hardship well, Iette saw Lacey off with an apologetic heart.

“President Lambert and the Empress Dowager Dowager naturally thought His Majesty would bring Mother back and just let him go. They sigh every day saying if they’d known both of you would retire like this, they absolutely wouldn’t have done that.”

“Haha…”

Iette, who received such regretful letters every day, laughed awkwardly.

Especially the Empress Dowager Dowager regretted not actively intervening when Iette stepped down from the Empress position due to the anti-Empress faction’s schemes.

Though Iette had stopped her, she had thought everything would return to normal when the Emperor came back. She had also hoped the cold relationship between the Emperor and Empress would improve then…

Anyway, the conclusion was that both were happy, so the Empress Dowager Dowager and Lambert were blocking anyone from interfering with that happiness.

“The anti-Empress faction has completely collapsed. Not just me, but military personnel who had attached themselves hoping for some benefit, as well as officials—they’re all regretting it. They’ve painfully realized that Your Majesty knew everything about the war with Colisha and even the situation after.”

“To only now realize that I became the God of War and conquered the entire continent all because the Goddess of Victory, Iette, was by my side. They’re all incredibly stupid.”

When Killian seriously interjected into Lacey’s grumbling words, Iette tapped her husband to stop him.

She got goosebumps all over whenever she heard such praise for something so trivial. She was nothing—just a history major student who knew nothing about war.

Though she hadn’t written about the Colisha war in her autobiography, Emperor Ivanoretz I of Colisha had too loose a tongue. He claimed that following Iette’s advice, he had issued evacuation orders to residents along the Sainte-Valion army’s advance route, so both countries avoided major damage.

Colisha had given up even its old capital but suffered no particular damage, and though Sainte-Valion had wasted much time, they preserved their forces as much as possible and could win the next war too.

The marshals and the Grande Armée, knowing everything had fallen into place according to the Empress’s predictions, were calling her the Goddess of Victory.

According to Monsignol, they’d been doing so for quite a while now.

“Anyway… be careful going back to the capital. Stay healthy always. Understood?”

“Yes, you too, Mother. …Father, stay healthy as well.”

Lacey, who greeted Iette, struggled to use the term “Father” for Killian too. Though they’d suggested it several times before, he couldn’t easily say it. Feeling they’d grown a bit closer, Killian also nodded and patted his son’s shoulder.

Finally, all four of them had become one family…

Iette had formed a happy family in the mansion blooming with roses.

It was an indescribably happy feeling.