“I told you, you’re making me dizzy.”
Cassion pushed me away.
Whether he liked it or not, I kept fussing over him.
Even curt like this, Cassion was such a welcome sight. I was simply glad he had woken up.
Watching a child who should have been carefully looked after instead moan unconscious was a painful thing.
And since I already carried guilt where Cassion was concerned, it weighed on me all the more.
In my past life, I had turned away from Cassion. Not deliberately — but seeing the state he was in now, I couldn’t help feeling the guilt of it anyway.
It’s not as if I can confidently say it wasn’t deliberate.
Because I had known Cassion was inside the royal palace, and that Julia and Dayson found him unwelcome.
I was no different.
I, too, had committed violence against Cassion. Looking away from violence is only violence by another name.
“How’s your body feeling? And your mood?”
I asked as I replaced the wet cloth that had slipped from Cassion’s forehead. He said nothing for a while.
Had he fallen back asleep?
His eyes were shut tight.
I carefully reached out and, strand by strand, lifted away the hair stuck to his forehead. Every so often my fingers brushed his skin, and Cassion’s brow twitched.
“It’s obvious you’re pretending to sleep. Should I stop talking to you? Am I annoying?”
“…No…”
Cassion answered belatedly.
“Have you been here long?”
He had finally opened his eyes properly, and asked in a cracked voice. I straightened in my chair and smiled brightly.
“About half a day?”
The sun was already rising. It had been night when I arrived. Somehow I’d ended up spending the whole night in Cassion’s palace.
“Were you nursing me?”
“Changing your wet cloth, giving you medicine. I suppose you could call it nursing.”
“Medicine?”
Cassion turned guarded at once. Even though the fact that he’d woken up after taking it should have told him it wasn’t poison, he still bristled like a cat meeting a stranger.
“Medicine to bring down your fever and protect your body. The effect was obvious enough, seeing as you woke up.”
Cassion seemed surprised that there was a medicine that actually worked on him. Then he muttered something, his expression unreadable.
“Thank you.”
“What?”
Did I just hear that right?
“I’m not saying it twice.”
Seeing Cassion’s reaction, I was sure I’d heard him correctly.
“Did you just say thank you?”
Cassion pressed his lips shut, the tips of his ears red.
How adorable. Embarrassed enough not to want to say it twice, and he still thanked me?
I felt like a mother who’d drilled a child who couldn’t add or subtract until they finally scored a hundred on the test.
Oh, how sweet. Should I even pat his head?
I reached out a hand, then lowered it. Cassion was nothing like Lebert.
Unlike Lebert, who loved being fussed over, Cassion made a face like he’d swallowed spoiled milk every time I tried to dote on him.
“I did do something worth a thank-you. I hired an amazing physician for Your Highness’s sake. On top of that, I stayed by your side all night, changing your wet cloth.”
“You didn’t sleep a wink?”
Cassion glanced at me, checking my reaction. A faint trace of worry crept into his voice, and it made me laugh softly.
I was two years older than Cassion, but I was still a child myself. For a child like that to stay up a whole night, anyone with a conscience would naturally feel both worried and sorry.
“No. They say beautiful women need their sleep. I tried to stay awake, but I couldn’t manage it. I dozed off here and there. Right beside Your Highness.”
“What? Beside me? In my bed? Here?”
Cassion sprang upright like a spring uncoiling. It was far too nimble a movement for someone supposedly ill.
“No. Here.”
I pointed, perfectly serious, at the chair I was sitting in. Cassion’s bed was wide, with plenty of room to spare, but I wasn’t shameless enough to covet a sickbed.
Cassion let out a long breath, looking far more relieved than the situation called for.
Is sharing a bed really that distasteful to him? He seems to have an unexpected attachment to his own things.
“Anyway, are you really all right?”
I had to ask the same question I’d started with all over again.
Now that he was sitting up, Cassion leaned back against the headboard, patted himself down here and there, and nodded slowly.
“I am. Strangely enough.”
Lebert’s medicine really is excellent. I’ll have to tell him when I get back.
“Can you talk for a while?”
“Yes. I’m fine.”
Cassion drank some water. He wanted cold water, wanting to clear his head completely, but I wouldn’t allow it, so he had to settle for lukewarm.
“Your Highness, does this happen to you often? Losing consciousness like this?”
“Sometimes?”
Cassion said it as if it were nothing.
“Sometimes you collapse for more than a full day?”
Cassion nodded in agreement.
This is not a small matter!
“I’m as careful as I can be, but when something unexpected happens…”
“What happened?”
If collapsing happened when something unexpected came up, then something unexpected must have happened to him right before I arrived.
I needed to know what it was.
“Anyway, why did you nurse me? If I was asleep, you should have just left.”
Cassion deftly changed the subject. That wasn’t the point here.
“How could I leave someone who’s sick? What if you’d died? Last night you looked like you could have died and it wouldn’t have been strange at all.”
“What’s wrong with dying?”
“Good heavens! Listen to yourself. Death is something everyone goes through eventually, but dying at our age would be a disaster, wouldn’t it? Your Highness, think about how old you are.”
An eleven-year-old was talking like some old man who’d lived a full life. Though I supposed the tone I was scolding him in didn’t sound much like a thirteen-year-old’s, either.
“Didn’t you and I both already give up on staying children?”
Cassion’s bitter tone washed away the effort I’d been making to keep the mood light.
I lightly swept back my disheveled hair.
“Fine. Between Your Highness wanting revenge and me trying to protect my house by any means necessary, neither of us has much chance of staying a child. Still, when it hurts, you can say it hurts, and you can rest. So rest today.”
This little thing.
I pressed my finger down on Cassion’s forehead. He scowled deeply and rolled his eyes up to look at me.
“Lie down. Or should I lie down with you? Shall I sing you a lullaby?”
“No!”
Cassion flinched and burrowed straight down under the blanket.
He acts like an old man one moment and like a child the next.
“The king came by.”
Cassion finally seemed to find the will to speak.
“I see.”
I answered with feigned indifference. If I showed too much interest, I worried Cassion would clam up again.
And I didn’t want to needlessly dig up his painful memories. I was afraid that if he, just now settled, started remembering, he might lose consciousness again.
“You don’t have to tell me. Your Highness, just focus on resting.”
“…Can you?”
Cassion cut in on my words.
“What?”
A thin voice drifted out from among the bundled blankets.
“Can you… buy me a house?”
“…!”
What Cassion said was hard to believe even hearing it directly. He was asking me to buy him a house!
This was an opportunity.
I wanted to hear in detail why he was asking me for this favor, but first, I had to seize the chance.
Even if it was beyond my own power, I had to make it happen, no matter what. I gripped the hem of my dress tightly and smiled, bright and sure of myself.
“I could buy you ten of them.”
I’d spoken to Cassion with such confidence, but the house he wanted turned out to be one I couldn’t simply buy outright.
The mansion Cassion asked me to buy was the house where he and the former queen had once lived together — the place people called Twilight Manor.
Ever since Cassion had moved into the palace, the mansion had sat neglected, and now, for some reason, it had come up for auction.
“The queen has her eye on it, apparently.”
And the one after that mansion was Julia — Dayson’s mother, the current queen.
Why would someone who disliked Cassion want to buy the manor he’d lived in as a child?
“How Twilight Manor ended up on the market is suspicious too.”
Cho continued speaking as she watched me flip through the documents. The papers held the information Cho had dug up about Twilight Manor.
“And you too. Why do you suddenly want to buy Twilight Manor?”
According to Cho’s report, Twilight Manor was a historic building, but as a purchase it offered no profit whatsoever.
The location wasn’t great, either.
“It’s an engagement gift.”
“What?”
“I told you already. That I’m going to marry His Highness Cassion. His Highness wants that mansion.”
Cho let out a long hum through her nose and slumped into the chair in front of the desk. She studied me, swinging one leg idly.
Ignoring Cho’s gaze, I kept looking into the circumstances behind the mansion going up for auction.
Twilight Manor, left behind by the former queen Violetta, was supposed to pass automatically to Cassion once he came of age. And yet it had suddenly turned up for auction.
“It says the former queen Violetta owed the bank a huge debt. Even though the palace kept providing her living expenses the whole time?”
The former queen Violetta had been deposed on the grounds that she couldn’t bear children. It had happened less than a year after King Karman had Dayson by Julia.
Violetta’s own family had turned their backs on their abandoned daughter. Deposed, with no family to support her, Violetta had been on the verge of complete isolation.
Just as her life was about to spiral down into poverty, Karman had stepped in.
King Karman had the law changed so that a deposed queen would still be paid a living allowance.
Did His Majesty love Lady Violetta?
The law suddenly changing, and Cassion born after she was deposed.
It was more than enough evidence that King Karman had loved Queen Violetta.
Then what was all that getting along so well with Julia?
Even so, Karman’s behavior still made no sense to me. I set aside the question with no answer and went back over the report.
“She wasn’t the extravagant type, either…”
“No, she wasn’t. From what I hear, she barely kept any maids, trying to save every coin of the pittance the palace gave her.”
“Then why would she have needed such a large sum of money?”
“Her son’s medical bills?”
That wasn’t the answer either. Cassion’s medical expenses were paid separately from the living allowance, straight from the palace.
Cassion was a prince born of a deposed queen, but he was still the king’s blood, so the palace managed those costs.
“There must have been something she needed it for, somewhere.”
Cho treated it as nothing much. I, on the other hand, felt an instinct that this was exactly the thread to pull.
“It’s strange, Aunt. I should dig into this first.”
“Are you really going to buy Twilight Manor?”
“Of course.”
“The queen won’t just sit still for it. Did I not tell you what kind of person Queen Julia is?”
She had. It had been one night when I’d told her, in all seriousness, that I intended to marry Cassion.
Cho had asked, carefully, whether I wouldn’t rather marry Dayson instead.
If the marriage was meant to protect my house, then right now, Dayson — blood of Julia, who held enough power to bring down a bird in flight — was by far the better choice.
I had refused. When I asked her not to question my reasons, Cho had brought up Julia.
Her temperament was no ordinary thing.
She doted on Dayson beyond reason.
She behaved as though Dayson were already the appointed king.
People vanished from around her for no clear reason.
A flower, beautiful, but one that breathed poison.
From the stories with real weight behind them to the rumors padded out with fiction, they all pointed to one fact.
Julia was a wicked woman, and crossing her would only cost me.
Of course, I already knew that. Having lived through it, I knew it far better than Cho, who only knew it from hearsay.
And because I knew it so well, Dayson and Julia couldn’t even make the list of alternatives.
