It had already been two weeks since the Miraculous Saint Margarite had returned to the capital of Nadirotsa from her pilgrimage. In all that time, there had been no private meetings whatsoever between the King and the Saint.
Hyderlin waited for the “response” with unhurried patience.
That day was no different from any other. She went to see the King.
She was reaching for the door of the sitting room when it flew open before her hand touched it, and she startled back. The person coming out was Margarite.
“Lady Margarite?”
Margarite had her head bowed low. She didn’t so much as acknowledge Hyderlin’s presence—she simply disappeared down the corridor.
The feeling in Hyderlin’s chest was not a good one.
She watched Margarite’s retreating back for a moment, then walked inside.
“Your Majesty.”
Chesa, who had been sitting with his head in his hands, looked up. His face was expressionless. But Hyderlin had spent enough years with him to know that for what it was—a mask shaped by years of living as a king. His blankness was the mirror image of turmoil.
“I wasn’t aware Your Majesty had an appointment with Lady Margarite.”
The King didn’t answer her question. A long silence followed. Then Chesa spoke.
“Sister. Did you put your hand into the Order’s affairs?”
So the “response” had come from the Order. Hyderlin confirmed it without a flicker.
“I did. As the Princess of Lotsa, I met with the Archbishop. I conveyed a donation as a gesture of good faith—in the hope that the warm relationship between the Order and the crown might continue for many years to come.”
“……”
“At the same time, I mentioned that as the Saint and the current King are of a similar age, nothing would bring more joy than if the two institutions were to be united through a holy union. The Archbishop was receptive.”
“……”
“It was to make the Saint your queen.”
Chesa fell silent again. Something was wrong. The sense of unease grew.
Hyderlin had handled the matter with considerable delicacy. Marriage negotiations between noble families—while an open secret—typically proceeded in much the same fashion. She could not conceive of where it had gone astray.
When Chesa finally spoke again, there was a faint undercurrent of anger in his voice.
“Do you know what she said to me?”
“……”
“She asked me if she looked like a woman for sale.”
“…What?”
“She told me I was a dirty, vulgar, low sort of man who thought he could buy a woman with gold.”
“……”
“She said she didn’t need my filthy donation—and she threw this at my feet!”
Chesa drove his foot into the box on the floor. It toppled and spilled open, gold coins cascading out with a ringing sound. It was roughly the sum Hyderlin had contributed.
She felt as though someone had shoved a cloth down her throat.
“If you were going to scheme, you should have done it properly. How could you botch something as simple as winning over one sheltered, naive girl?”
Chesa shouted it. It was not the kind of statement a man had grounds to make—a man who had himself been sent running by the very sheltered, naive girl in question—but Hyderlin did not register the irony. She only felt the weight of having failed him.
She murmured:
“I’m truly sorry.”
Chesa pressed his eyes shut. Having released the heat of his anger in that outburst, he seemed somewhat steadier. When he continued, he was more composed.
“…It’s already gone wrong. In her eyes, I’m a dirty, vulgar, low sort of man now.”
“……”
“Well. That’s not entirely incorrect. No matter how much I dress it up in nobility, the essence of it doesn’t change—it’s still base. Everything gets solved with filthy metal. Gold to make people compliant. Steel to make them quiet. Isn’t that right?”
“……”
“She, in all her purity, feeds the poor with her gold and cuts down wickedness with steel.”
Chesa laughed—a hollow, defeated sound.
“Why is it that I can never simply live cleanly? Why does holding the respect of the lowborn require me to do sordid things? Is this the fate of anyone who holds power? Or is it the fault of something born into me?”
“……”
“Is it the blood, after all? This dirty blood of mine?”
Chesa laughed at himself bitterly. His mother’s humble origins had always been his open wound. Even Chesa—who had, unlike Hyderlin, a genuine claim to royal blood—could not entirely free himself from the burden of bloodline.
She said, from somewhere in the depths of a hollow devastation:
“Don’t say that. Whatever anyone tells you, you are the most noble and highest-ranking person to have ever walked this earth. You are the lawful sovereign of Lotsa. Everything in this country belongs to you.”
“And what good does any of it do me, when I can’t have the one woman I love?”
“……”
“I don’t understand it. Why did she refuse me so cruelly, that day? Why did she look at me like that and run? As though I’d been some many-legged insect who had dared to propose marriage.”
“……”
“I was so certain she felt the same…”
It was something Hyderlin had privately wondered about as well. Chesa and Margarite had built a close friendship over several years. Even to Hyderlin’s uninitiated eye, the two of them had been genuinely, unmistakably close. The degree to which Margarite had recoiled from Chesa’s proposal—that, Hyderlin had never been able to explain.
She had even asked Chesa once, in carefully roundabout terms, whether he had perhaps said something strange in his proposal—but his account of it had been perfectly ordinary.
So Hyderlin had never been able to understand Margarite. What possible reason could there be to flee from the proposal of a man with everything Chesa had to offer, as though she had encountered a ghost?
Chesa muttered irritably:
“I’ve thought about it for a long time. Why did she run like that? What did I do wrong? I’ve asked the question over and over.”
“……”
“And I couldn’t find a single answer. Everything was perfect.”
“……”
“Everything—except for my birth.”
The bloodline, again. Chesa began chewing at his thumbnail. Hyderlin covered his hand with hers.
“Chesa. Stop that. You’ll damage yourself.”
“Sister—why? She said she believed birth didn’t matter. She said it more than once. Was all of that just words? Was it only something she could say because she was a Saint surrounded by a righteous Holy Knight and pious clergy? Did her mind change the moment a handmaid’s son declared his love?”
“Calm down. Chesa. That’s—”
She had been about to say: that’s a leap.
“…I suppose someone at the level of Sarg Gloriosa is what she’d actually need, to consider someone worth her notice.”
But at that precise moment, Hyderlin found herself thinking of Sarg Gloriosa.
The Duke’s son. The unwavering, incorruptible Holy Knight who was always at Margarite’s side.
The only person who could call Margarite Mak.
Could it be him? Could he be the reason she had refused Chesa?
Well—a man who was straight and bright as a blade forged from starlight, and a Saint as pure as a magnolia blossom. They did, it had to be admitted, suit each other terribly well. Bitterly well.
Chesa raked a hand through his hair again and again with a nervous, fraying energy. At last he looked up with the face of the most highly born coward in the world.
“Born as I was, I have no choice but to use the base tools a base man uses. I will make her my queen by whatever means necessary. This time, there will be no clumsy missteps.”
“Of course. I won’t disappoint you this time.”
Hyderlin bowed her head.
“Give me the order.”
Chesa closed his eyes. His brow furrowed. The vile king turned to his sword, and whispered quietly:
“Yes. First things first—that Holy Knight who clings to Margarite’s side like a burr will have to be removed…”
Every winter, the Kroitze Holy Knights rode out to suppress the undead in the northern mountain range. The campaign typically took roughly four weeks. But this one would be different.
Sarg would not return to Nadirotsa for at least six weeks. Because there would be an “unforeseen accident” during the campaign.
For this purpose, Hyderlin had hired a sorcerer at considerable expense.
Chesa’s wish was for Sarg Gloriosa to freeze to death somewhere in the mountain snow and never come back. It was a knight’s duty to fulfill her king’s wishes—but this was, for perhaps the first time in a very long while, a point on which Hyderlin found herself quietly opposed.
She persuaded Chesa that Sarg Gloriosa was worth more to them alive than dead. The King accepted.
The day of departure arrived.
Hyderlin stood at a distance and watched the Holy Knights assemble. Sarg Gloriosa and the rest of the Kroitze Order had formed up in neat, precise rows for the departure ceremony.
Finding Sarg among so many knights was no great effort. He was exceptionally tall, conspicuously so—a crane among a flock of sparrows.
Front row. Posture immaculate, as one would expect from him. The long hair he wore tied back streamed in the wind. Silver, like a field of untouched snow. Hyderlin knew the scent that came from that hair.
Though she wasn’t sure if it would still be the same.
She didn’t know. The last time they had spoken had been before he left on the Saint’s pilgrimage—more than half a year ago now.
She could have written a letter. She hadn’t. She could have gone to him when he returned to the capital, offered some simple word of greeting. She hadn’t done that either. She could walk over to him right now and wish him safe travels. She wouldn’t.
She had kept her distance from Sarg. The season when they had seen each other nearly every week was long past. Now they were people with no occasion to meet unless official business required it.
She was, for the most part, unbothered by this. But occasionally—not often, just occasionally—she found it acutely, piercingly bitter.
Now was one of those times.
The King’s knight, who had no standing to offer so much as a word of farewell, watched Sarg’s profile in silence. She told herself she was storing up the sight of him, since she wouldn’t be seeing him for some time.
At that moment, Sarg turned his head.
