“I will take that to heart.”

Even with Andrea’s assurances, the king remained displeased, and Andrea quietly shifted the conversation to a subject his father enjoyed.

“In any case, you must recover quickly and attend the May Festival and the Hunt in person.”

The aim landed perfectly.

A spark of anticipation, the kind that belongs to a man who lives for pleasure, flickered suddenly across the king’s pallid face.

The king was, in truth, a man who enjoyed lavish banquets, balls, and hunts far more than his son Andrea did.

Andrea’s pleasures were easy camaraderie with friends and drink, but the king enjoyed being the sole focus of attention, being admired, and dancing with young ladies.

His appetite for women had led him to carry on an affair with a lady of the Blanc Ducal House fifteen years his junior, and when she became pregnant, he had deposed the Queen Dowager. That had been thirteen years ago.

The lady from back then was the current queen, Fabienne.

So what more was there to say.

Old habits die hard.

Queen Fabienne was now approaching her mid-thirties, and the brilliance of her beauty was slowly fading. She could not compare to the fresh-faced young ladies just making their debuts.

On top of that, her one son, the second prince Henry, was showing increasingly wayward tendencies, and it seemed to be wearing on her. Her once-striking looks were fading fast.

Andrea decided to make use of that.

She had used beauty and youth to unseat the Queen Dowager. Now that those weapons had dulled, wasn’t it her turn to be pushed aside?

He had noticed that the king was beginning to lose interest in his ripened queen and was showing a fondness for considerably younger, fresher ladies.

Andrea found it pathetic, but concluded it was simply the man’s nature, and chose to use it.

‘I wonder, Your Highness the queen, how would you like the taste of your own medicine.’

Smiling to himself at that thought, Andrea watched the king make a show of demurring.

“The May Festival is something you young people should attend to carry on the tradition. How could I possibly join in at my age? Perhaps the final awards ceremony, but nothing more.”

The words said no, but the eyes looked pleased. Andrea caught it immediately and kept working on his father with subtle persistence.

“What do you mean? Are you unaware that countless unmarried ladies still secretly admire Your Majesty? And if the five-time champion of the Hunt in royal history declines to participate, the whole event loses its spirit, Father.”

He slipped in the word ‘Father,’ warm and familiar, a word he rarely used outside of childhood, and the king’s mouth stretched into a long, satisfied line.

“Is that so?”

The king reined in his spreading smile and drank down the mulberry wine, said to be good for vitality.

The palace butler standing in attendance watched the crown prince cheerfully encouraging the king, already notorious for his romantic escapades, and shifted with visible unease.

But Andrea only raised one eyebrow and lifted his teacup to his lips with perfect calm.

“I hear the competition among the debutantes at the May Festival ball, all secretly hoping to share the first dance with His Majesty the King, is fiercer than ever this year.”

At those words, the light seemed to return to the king’s eyes for a moment, and Andrea lowered his gaze, thinking inwardly, ‘what a hopeless philanderer.’

A short while later, the king finished his mulberry wine and seemed to suddenly find his energy returning, along with the urge to tidy himself up. He gave orders to the attendants standing by.

“Open the window. The air in here is stifling.”

Two servants swept the curtains back on either side with a swish.

But something had been propped against the inside of the curtain, and it fell straight onto the marble floor with a sharp clang.

The sound was crisp enough that the king scowled and clicked his tongue.

“Can’t you be more careful!”

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

A short while later, as Andrea left the king’s bedchamber, his gloved hand held the object that had tumbled from the windowsill.

He moved directly to the palace physician’s hall connected to the main palace and opened one particular door.

The dim room was packed on all sides with laboratory equipment, pipettes, distillation apparatus, Bunsen burners, and strange liquids bubbling away in various vessels.

It looked less like a physician’s consulting room and more like the laboratory of a mad scientist.

In the middle of it all, a young man with unkempt hair was hunched over something, examining it with great concentration.

He looked at the silver incense burner Andrea set down beside him and asked without much interest.

“What’s this?”

Andrea pulled out a chair and sat down, answering with only a tilt of his head.

“You’re the one who needs to find that out.”

The young man scratched his messy hair, examined the object carefully, and bent to sniff at the liquid remaining inside.

“I’d need a few days of analysis to say anything.”

Andrea glanced idly at the row of glass bottles containing unidentified liquids lined up on the shelf and asked.

“Is there any poison you don’t know?”

“Are you certain it’s a poison?”

“It came from inside the palace. The odds of it being a poison rather than not are higher.”

There was no alarm in Andrea’s expression, just a faint, certain smile.

“Where did it come from?”

“It was rolling around in His Majesty’s bedchamber. Silver on the outside, gold on the inside.”

“Hmm……”

That got Rufus’s attention. He pushed up his monocle and extracted the contents with a pipette.

Andrea needled him with a goading tone.

“The other royal physicians are all busy attending to His Majesty’s condition.”

“……Oh…… right……”

He scratched his head as though hearing this for the first time, and Andrea clicked his tongue.

“You’re supposedly the head royal physician, and your experiments take priority over the health of the royal family?”

Rufus had drawn out the last drop from the silver incense burner and grumbled.

“In exchange, I’m always developing groundbreaking treatments. That’s why Your Highness dragged me to the palace in the first place.”

Rufus was one of Andrea’s inner circle, and he spent his days buried in this laboratory, conducting whatever eccentric experiments he pleased on the royal family’s coin.

Andrea had lured him to the palace with exactly that promise, so he had no grounds to complain.

“Either way, find out what it is and what it does, as quickly as possible.”

Rufus was already mixing the suspicious liquid with some reagent and watching the reaction. Andrea left him to it and walked out of the physician’s hall.

He still held the silver incense burner in his hand, now emptied of its contents.

Back at Eli Palace, Andrea went to his study and opened a drawer, pulling something out.

The drawing sketchbook he had confiscated from Raul not long ago.

He opened it standing up, turning the pages with impatient hands.

He flipped through quickly, and his hands stopped at a particular section.

It was where the drawings of Queen Dowager Marietta began. More precisely, the point at which the queen had fallen ill and taken to her bed.

Andrea’s eyes narrowed sharply as he studied the drawings.

In every drawing of the queen’s room, positioned by the window, was an ornament identical in shape to the silver incense burner he was holding.

Sometimes it was left out, or sketched roughly, but it appeared often enough throughout.

The distinctive hourglass-shaped silver piece, which appeared to have been imported from the eastern continent, sat in the drawings without drawing any particular attention.

The next page, and the next, and the one after that. The silver incense burner was always there, standing by the window beside his mother’s bed.

Something cold slid down Andrea’s spine like a snake.

‘Is this truly a coincidence?’

He must have absorbed the shape of that ornament unconsciously while looking through the drawings of his mother’s final years.

When it had rolled across the floor of the king’s bedchamber, something had stirred in him, a sense of familiarity he could not immediately place.

There are moments when a decisive instinct cuts through a person like a current.

And that moment connected directly to the fact that the king, once so vigorous, had lately been wasting away.

Now that suspicion had taken hold, the symptoms his mother had shown in her slow decline and the king’s current condition began to overlap.

‘Could they be suffering at the same hands?’

Andrea called Alfonso in immediately and gave his instructions.

“The servants who worked at my mother’s estate.”

“Yes.”

“Can all of them be traced, wherever they’ve scattered?”

“Most received letters of recommendation at the time, so tracing them is possible. With one or two exceptions.”

“Ah. Then tracing the ones who didn’t take a letter of recommendation would be faster.”