Chapter 19

Crash!

The rose-patterned teacup shattered to pieces on the floor.

“Oh my, I’m so sorry! I’m not used to gatherings like this — I must have gotten too nervous.”

Putting on an exaggerated show of embarrassment, Adele fumbled to gather up the pieces.

“It’s all right, my lady. The cup’s broken — do be careful.”

It was just as April reached out to stop her.

“Ah!”

Blood welled bright red from a cut on Adele’s finger.

“Are you all right, my lady? Someone fetch a physician at once!”

Adele waved her hands quickly at April, who was already calling out to the chamberlain.

“No, it’s only a small cut. A handkerchief will do just fine.”

Then Adele turned and smiled at Seira.

“I’m sorry to ask, Seira, but would you take off my shoes for me?”

“I— what?”

Seira glared at her, utterly dumbfounded, but Adele held out her foot as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“My foot seems to have gotten wet, and as you can see, my hand’s hurt.”

Only moments ago, Seira had been calling Adele “Mother” and putting on every show of closeness. So there was no way she could refuse now. In a situation like this, a mother could ask any number of things of her daughter.

“Go on.”

Everyone watched the scene unfold with great interest. Aside from April, there wasn’t a soul present who didn’t know exactly what lay between the two of them.

Seira knelt reluctantly in front of Adele, who rested her foot on her knee as naturally as anything.

“Thank you for helping me, Seira.”

Murmurs of stifled laughter rose here and there. By tomorrow morning, the story would already be spreading through high society.

The Empire’s Jewel, Seira Oswald, brought to her knees before Kalaim’s own wicked woman, Adele!

Just imagining the headline was humiliating enough to make Seira’s fingertips tremble. But she had no idea yet that something even more humiliating was waiting for her.

“Oh my, the two of you really do look lovely together.”

Only April, oblivious to it all, beamed with satisfaction. So Adele played along.

“Seira massages my feet for me sometimes, you know.”

Have you lost your mind?

Seira mouthed the words silently, glaring up at her with a face full of fury. Adele looked away from that glare and smiled at the Princess instead.

“She’s offering to do it again right now, in fact. Her fingers are so long, it feels wonderful.”

“Oh my, I imagine it would.”

April clasped her hands together, looking thoroughly impressed.

Adele turned back to Seira and smiled gently.

“Seira, why not massage Her Highness’s feet instead of mine? She does seem curious about your touch.”

Seira’s face went crimson with fury, but she forced a smile.

“Mother, wouldn’t that be disrespectful toward Her Highness? One shouldn’t let just anyone touch her feet…”

April spoke up at once.

“I don’t mind at all! I really am curious about your touch, Lady Seira.”

“She says she doesn’t mind, Seira. Go on and do it for her.”

Adele nodded gracefully, as if granting permission.

The Princess’s ladies-in-waiting, watching with great interest, sided with Adele as well.

“Her Highness really does seem curious, Lady Seira.”

“How enviable. What a fine chance to show off your touch.”

They weren’t taking sides to help Adele — not in the slightest. That was simply the nature of high society. Bow your head to whoever held the power, but the moment someone showed the smallest weakness or opening, everyone wanted to drag her down and tear into her.

Every one of them, in her own heart, had been looking for a chance to mock Seira.

“W-well, then.”

Seira had no choice but to kneel before the Princess and slip off her shoe.

“My, your fingers really are long and lovely. A touch like this must feel wonderful indeed.”

“What an honor, getting the chance to massage Her Highness’s feet.”

While the women were thoroughly enjoying their sport of mocking Seira, Adele calmly switched the Princess’s dessert plate with Seira’s.

This, if anything, was the textbook case of reaping exactly what you sow.

---

Pffffbbbbt!

The women, who had been laughing brightly over their tea, froze for a moment. They traded looks, each silently hoping it wasn’t what it sounded like.

Pfft — brrrt… brrt…!

When the unmistakable sound followed right on its heels, no one knew where to look.

“Madame Hans, are you all right?”

Seira asked, turning to Madame Hans beside her with a face full of concern.

“M-me?”

Madame Hans looked around in a fluster. At this rate, she’d end up taking the blame for that bizarre, mortifying noise.

“Y-yes, of course I’m fine!”

But Seira took her hand and asked the Princess’s leave.

“Your Highness, might Madame Hans and I step out for a short walk?”

“Yes, go right ahead.”

April nodded quickly, clearly embarrassed herself.

“No, I’m fine! I really am fine!”

Seira soothed Madame Hans, who was shouting with her face bright red.

“It happens to everyone. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Come along now, Madame.”

“It wasn’t me! It really wasn’t me!”

Madame Hans insisted desperately that nothing was wrong with her own body. But Seira, in far too great a hurry herself, summoned some unnatural strength and hauled her bodily out of the room.

“You really can’t hide common blood, can you.”

“Isn’t that the truth. Whatever has she been eating, to make a stench like that…”

The Princess’s ladies-in-waiting pinched their noses and gossiped at Madame Hans’s expense.

Madame Hans was wealthy, but she hadn’t been born into nobility. It was only by trailing after Seira that she’d gotten a foothold in high society at all — so the Princess’s ladies-in-waiting, every one of them nobly born, looked down on her in secret.

Once again, Adele resolved to keep her distance from high society.

A little while later, the chamberlain approached the Princess and spoke.

“Her Majesty the Empress is asking for the Dowager Marchioness of Oswald.”

“Mother’s asking for her?”

The chamberlain bowed courteously toward Adele.

“Allow me to show you the way, my lady.”

---

“You sent for me, Your Majesty?”

Christine stepped into the Emperor’s office in a neat, well-pressed uniform.

The Emperor had been bent gravely over a report at his large desk, but at the sight of Christine, he broke into a welcoming smile.

“Come in, come in, Count!”

Emperor Jan Valencia, in his mid-forties, was tall and lean, with a somewhat high-strung look about him.

In the early days of his reign, he’d been compared constantly to the previous Emperor, who had been known for his gentle temperament. The Council of Elders — the five great houses — had liked him least of all.

Had the previous Emperor not died suddenly in the middle of the war, the throne would have passed naturally to his young son.

But the Emperor’s sudden death had come in the thick of a war with a neighboring country, and Kalaim’s fortresses were falling one after another. Every day mattered. The Empire needed someone on the throne who could command the crisis.

In the end, even the Council of Elders had thrown its support behind the dead Emperor’s younger brother, Grand Duke Jan Valencia.

Once he took the throne, Jan Valencia went on to conquer the smaller neighboring countries one after another, expanding the Empire’s territory. Thanks to that, he was immensely popular among the people now.

“Care for a drink?”

Coming around from behind his desk, Jan lifted a clear, gold-colored bottle and gave a wink.

“I’m in training.”

At the firm reply, Jan looked a little sheepish, then tipped the bottle straight to his lips and drank.

“The investiture ceremony’s coming up soon. It’ll put my mind at ease, having you take command of the Imperial Guard.”

“You flatter me.”

“By the way — when do you plan on making April your wife? What do you say to announcing the engagement right at the ceremony?”

“Is that an imperial command?”

Christine’s reply was stiff, bordering on insolent.

Jan’s brow creased, and he set the bottle down on the desk with a sharp clack.

“I heard you’ve moved into the Marchioness’s house. That was purely to search for the document I ordered you to find, I assume?”

“There were personal matters to look into as well.”

“Don’t forget my warning. Don’t do anything to upset April.”

For a moment, Christine’s brows drew into an awkward, troubled line.

“I’ve never promised Her Highness any kind of future.”

Jan stepped closer to Christine and fussed needlessly with his neat uniform, straightening it.

“You know perfectly well. Soon enough, you’ll be my dependable imperial consort. For that, you and April need to at least look like you’re in love with each other. Frankly, I don’t care what you get up to with the Marchioness. But it would be a problem if April, or anyone else, started to suspect and catch on.”

Christine slowly closed his hand around Jan’s, which was still fussing with the epaulette on his uniform.

“I won’t be the one in trouble, Your Majesty.”

His blue-gray eyes looked down with open arrogance.

“…!”

Jan’s hand trembled as he fought down his anger. At last he wrenched it free of Christine’s grip and issued a command, every inch the Emperor.

“I’ll give you one month. Find the Blank Document within that time, and move out of the Marchioness’s house.”

“I decide everything for myself.”

Jan glared at him, cold and murderous, but Christine showed not the slightest sign of being shaken.

“Does she know what you really are?”

It was a threat.

But Christine only laughed, as if he found it almost funny.

“Then I suppose I’ll have to confess what I am to Her Highness as well. Even so, Your Majesty would still force the marriage through, and that timid girl would lie down beside me every night in fear. And as I’m a beast, I don’t know how to govern my own appetites.”

“YOU INSOLENT—!!”

In the end, unable to contain his fury, Jan hurled the bottle at him, but Christine caught it with ease. Not only that — the instant he tightened his grip, the bottle in his hand burst apart with a sharp crack, shattering into pieces.

“…!”

As glass fragments glittered and fell from Christine’s hand, Jan’s face went pale. The fact that this man possessed a strength no human had struck him anew with fear.

“Don’t forget. Who it was that made Grand Duke Jan Valencia an Emperor.”

Now that was a threat.

But as if nothing at all had happened, Christine bowed his head in a perfectly courteous salute.

“I’ll take my leave, then.”

Thud!

He shut the door behind him and left, but Jan just stood there blankly for a while. Then, trembling all over, he muttered,

“I’ve let that beast grow too powerful…!”

He was the Emperor of Kalaim, feared and revered by the whole world. And yet that insolent man dared look down on him with those arrogant eyes!

Still, it hadn’t been a total loss. He’d learned that even that beast, who seemed to have no weakness at all, did have one.

Adele Oswald…

They were clearly no mere acquaintances. The moment her name came up, his eyes had turned into those of a fierce, possessive male.

Perhaps she could become the rein that controlled him.

---

The Empress seemed to be on her way back from a hunt.

Dressed in riding clothes, a horsewhip in hand, she was cutting across the palace garden. Blood was spattered here and there across her clothes.

She came from a minor knightly family, they said, and had ridden the battlefields alongside the Emperor. Because of that, the Council of Elders had taken issue with the Empress’s origins and qualifications — every Empress before her had been a daughter of one of the Council of Elders’ own great houses.

“Greetings, Your Majesty.”

Adele greeted her,

“Your circumstances seem to have improved considerably of late.”

The Empress looked Adele over from head to toe, making no effort to hide her displeasure.

Every year, Adele had shown up to the year-end banquet looking shabbier than anyone else — a penniless Marchioness in an out-of-fashion dress, without a single piece of jewelry. But now, both her clothes and her whole bearing were far more refined. And her face, of all things, had grown so radiant.

“It’s all thanks to Their Majesties. I’m grateful you allowed me to supply my desserts to the palace.”

“Well, they say a woman grows prettier once she has a man. Especially a rich one — that tends to fill out quite a few other things too.”

Adele’s eyes went wide with shock.

The Empress gave a thin smile and flicked her eyes toward the attendants behind her.

A moment later, a blood-soaked, blonde-haired woman was dragged out and forced to her knees on the ground.

The Empress looked down at her and spoke, clearly meaning for Adele to hear.

“I despise an immoral person more than anything. Especially the vulgar sort who think a pretty face gives them the right to paw at another woman’s man — it turns my stomach, truly.”

“I don’t understand why Your Majesty is telling me this.”

Adele asked, barely holding down the sting of the insult.

“This is Madame Rined, His Majesty’s mistress. She dared put her hands on something of the Empress’s, trusting nothing but a man’s favor — so I mean to cut off her wrist and teach her better.”

No sooner had she finished speaking than the bloodied woman screamed and threw herself at the Empress’s feet, clinging to her. But the attendants quickly seized her and dragged her away.

This time, the Empress lifted Adele’s chin with the handle end of her riding crop.

“Let me put it plainly. My April will soon be married to Count Weiss. So it would be a problem if you went on carrying on so freely, the way you have been.”

Adele’s face flushed red with humiliation. Everyone around them glanced at her and whispered. Their looks were the kind you’d give a woman you took for a whore.

Clasping her hands tightly together, Adele looked the Empress straight in the eye.

“Whatever you think of me — do you truly trust the Count so little?”

“What did you say?”

“He’s the man Their Majesties themselves chose. And more than anything, he isn’t the kind of man who’d look twice at anyone else while he has a woman in his heart.”

“Hold your tongue!”

the Empress snapped viciously.

But Adele held her gaze stubbornly and went on.

“I cannot stand by and let you keep casting doubt on the Count’s honor.”

“You insolent little— how dare you!”

The Empress’s riding crop sliced sharply through the air.

Thwack!

A vicious crack rang out, and droplets of blood sprayed into the air.

“Ahh!”

Crying out in shock, Adele quickly lifted her head. A great shadow had stepped in to block her.

“Count Weiss!”

People cried out as if in alarm.