An unusual light flickered in Cho’s eyes.
At my bombshell announcement, Cho’s eyes sparkled instead of widening in shock.
As expected, Cho was different from other people. An ordinary person would have laughed it off as the babble of a naive child dreaming of marrying a prince.
But Cho did not laugh. Her eyes gleamed.
It was the look of someone calculating, thoroughly, whether there was anything she could gain from what I had said.
Still, she did not believe my words would come true. Beneath it all lay doubt.
“You’re going to marry His Highness Cassion? You?”
For now I nodded vigorously.
At the moment my proposal was being refused, but it was only a matter of time before Cassion took my hand. I was confident I could make it so.
“Ha!”
Cho let out a sigh. I couldn’t read her feelings. I slowly explained my plan.
“I’ll marry His Highness and inherit the house, and make a full-scale investment in your guild, Aunt. In return, I want you to put my commissions first, always.”
“So first you want me to work for free, is that it?”
“Of course not.”
I seized the necklace around my neck and tore it off. The gold chain snapped and scraped my skin, but I paid it no mind.
Cho narrowed her eyes. Janice was horrified without a sound.
Offhandedly rubbing the wound on my nape, I held out to Cho the necklace set with a gem as big as a thumb.
“This is the first retainer. Find me someone. In the slums of the capital, with sky-blue hair, about… sixteen years old? His name is Lebert.”
There was no time to waste.
I needed the mad doctor right now.
Cho accepted my commission with a dumbfounded face, in return for an emerald larger than an adult’s thumb joint. While Cho handled my request, I too went diligently about my own business.
“I’m here, Your Highness.”
Tonight too was a night excursion. I greeted him as I opened Cassion’s door.
I’m tired of sneaking in every time I come.
I brushed off my dress, which had gotten dirty from crawling through the hole in the fence.
But I can’t exactly go in and out in the open.
If Count Kolkos learned I was meeting Cassion, he would scheme, and Dayson would throw a fit.
I absolutely can’t be found out. More to the point, I wonder how many days Count Kolkos will stay quiet.
I had heard that Count Kolkos, who had left after being insulted by me last time, was shut up meeting with his vassals and not showing his face.
Along with the news that he was going around saying a guardian had to be designated urgently.
I have to persuade His Highness quickly.
I grew anxious.
“Your Highness, are you asleep?”
Unlike usual, Cassion was quiet.
When I went into the room, I saw Cassion in an uneasy mood. He sat by the moonlit window, wrapped in a blanket, looking up at the sky.
If he had been a healthy child it would have made a picture, but with a skinny Cassion sitting there like that, it felt precarious.
He looks like he’ll die any moment.
From him came a thick scent of resignation, as though he might let go of his life at any time without it being strange.
“Have you eaten? Is Flack looking after you well?”
I crossed the room and set a chair beside Cassion. I spoke as I sat down. Cassion still did not answer.
A familiar snub.
For a while Cassion had treated me as an unwelcome guest and fussed at me to leave. But after he blacked out a few times in the middle of shouting at me, he had stuck to ignoring me.
I knew I’d be ignored when I came. So I’m not upset.
Hypnotizing myself, I smiled brightly at Cassion.
They say you can’t spit at a smiling face, and I had hoped Cassion would be cheered by my smile too, but today he didn’t even glance my way.
He was like a sulking cat, and I wanted to take his cheeks and shake them. But I was afraid his head would come off, so I couldn’t.
“Your Highness, stop being stubborn and marry me, will you?”
I thought today’s fixed repertoire would go ahead as usual.
Marry me, then. No.
Marry me, then. Get lost.
But then,
“…Will anything change if I do?”
An answer I had not expected came out of Cassion’s mouth.
Before I knew it, Cassion had turned around on the windowsill and was looking at me.
Only then could I see Cassion’s face properly. Cassion’s condition today was a mess.
The skin beneath his eyes had sunk in, and there was half-wiped blood at the corner of his mouth.
Flack, you! I told you to report everything without leaving anything out!
Though I knew that Flack was in a situation where he couldn’t contact me often, whenever something went wrong with Cassion, I found myself blaming Flack first.
What had my prince, frail (only in health), gone through this time?
“Tell me. Will anything change if I marry you?”
A thin thread of hope. He was trying to find it in me.
Then, strangely, the sweet words that would normally have flowed out of me only lingered around my lips and would not come out.
What’s wrong with me today?
“I’m asking whether marrying you would cure this wretched illness, and let me smash in Dayson’s face.”
So Dayson had visited.
I remembered the things Dayson had spewed at Cassion the last time I was at the palace.
Fortunately he seemed not to have noticed that the conditions had improved, but it was easy to guess that this time too he had left after throwing a considerable tantrum. I looked straight into Cassion’s eyes and said,
“Yes. I’ll cure your illness, and I’ll let you smash Dayson’s face in, or rather, choke Dayson’s neck.”
Words like a vow poured out of my mouth. I spoke each word clearly and firmly so that Cassion could believe me.
“How?”
This was not a question asked out of disbelief. It was a question begging me to make him believe.
“I told you. I have a lot of money. There’s nothing money can’t do. Just tell me what you want.”
“You talk as though you could buy a country as a joke, don’t you?”
Not as a joke, but easily. Once I became Head of House and could spend the Irenber fortune freely, I could buy one small country right away.
And in the future I planned to grow the fortune even bigger. Because I would take back what Dayson had taken from me.
“Do you want a country? A country… just take our kingdom. I’ll make it happen, myself.”
Because I would take the country Dayson was going to have.
When I finished, Cassion shook his head as if he had heard some truly insane talk. But the corners of his mouth had softened.
“Don’t think only negative thoughts. If you need land, I’ll carve off an estate near the capital for you. So will you marry me, Cassion?”
I would give Cassion the best I could give. For now, that was money, and later it would be power.
But from Cassion’s point of view, I must look like a braggart.
Cassion was silent for a while.
“No, I won’t.”
And the answer that finally came was a refusal.
I thought he’d come all the way around! Is this brat messing with me right now?
My fist clenched hard, but I held back.
What else could I do, begging him to marry me, but hold back?
“Fine, don’t.”
I let the back I had stiffened with expectation sag and slouched carelessly in the chair. And I decided to end today’s courtship here.
Besides, life is “no, no, no,” until it becomes “yes, yes, yes.”
Cassion’s gaze stuck to the side of my face.
His expression was still blank, but a glint of mischief gathered in his eyes.
“By the way, you just spoke casually to me. That’s mocking the royal family.”
“Report me, then.”
Cassion looked at me as if to say what kind of creature is this, then sighed.
He stepped on the footstool he had set against the wall and climbed down from the windowsill. Cassion walked slowly and crept under his blanket.
I pretended not to care while watching his every move. In case he staggered, I would have to catch him.
Fortunately he reached the bed safely and even pulled the soft blanket over himself.
Since I had begun looking after him, Cassion’s health had improved, if only faintly.
In the past he would have drawn deep breath after deep breath on the way to the bed, but today he went all the way without a single pause.
I held in check the expression that threatened to melt with pride. Cassion hated it so much when I worried about him that I couldn’t let it show.
He told me not to pity him, or something.
I have never pitied Cassion.
I’m good to Cassion for my own benefit, not because I feel sorry for him. And also because of the conscience of the adult I used to be.
But I couldn’t explain that in detail, so I just said, It’s not pity. Of course Cassion didn’t believe me, and he scowled whenever I made a worried face.
“Have you eaten?”
I had already told Cassion that this was not worry, just an everyday question anyone could ask anyone.
So from last time he had given short answers at least, but today Cassion acted as though he hadn’t heard.
“Has he already fallen asleep?”
I approached the bed. His eyelids were shut tight. I waved my hand in front of his eyes. His long lashes did not stir.
He had been wilting like a kitten that had never once had its fill of its mother’s milk, and now sleep seemed to have swallowed him up quickly.
“I have to find him fast.”
The search for Lebert was going slower than I had expected. Before I died, Chorni’s information gathering had been faster than the intelligence bureau the palace ran, so fast that Dayson had marveled at it.
“This is too frustrating.”
Once I married Cassion and could dispose of the fortune as I pleased, I would invest in Cho first.
I pulled the blanket up and covered him without a gap.
But what on earth happened to His Highness?
The question Cassion had asked sat on my chest like a stone.
At last, Cho, whom I had been waiting and waiting for, came to see me. It was around the time I was listening to the climax of a detective novel Janice was reading aloud.
“Aah, you scared me!”
Janice recoiled at the sight of Cho, who had come in through the window without a sound.
“You’re here, Aunt?”
“Aren’t you the least bit startled, child?”
Well, I had seen her shadow first.
I shrugged. Janice mumbled something incomprehensible like why didn’t anyone tell me and closed the book and stepped back.
“What about the job I commissioned?”
“Found him.”
“I knew you would.”
Cho’s eyebrows rose.
“Sometimes you act like a hundred-year-old. Anyone watching would think you’d lived life twice.”
I’m not a hundred, but it’s true that this is my second time through.
“I’d like to enjoy a bit of idle chat with you, Aunt, but I’m in a hurry. Where is he?”
The night before, Cassion had been seriously ill. The medicine from Dallas could not even ease his pain.
So I needed the person I was looking for, right now.
A man who had risen in one leap to be the royal physician through his genius medical skill and the development of new remedies, but had fallen into the abyss after being struck by the madness of necrophilia.
Lebert.
The year I turned fifteen, he had developed a medicine that eased pain as if by magic. I remembered that Cassion’s condition had improved a little after taking it.
I have to bring the development of that medicine forward as much as I can.
