The Third Prince’s Palace, where Cassion lived, sat in a secluded corner of the sprawling palace grounds, in the north, where the least light fell.
It stood where one would normally expect to find the dormitories of attendants, and even then only those who did the menial work, and the scenery around it was dismal.
The branches of the landscaping trees, left unmaintained and grown into a tangle, stretched out onto the road, so that not even a carriage could pass.
You could tell how Cassion was treated in the palace just by looking at the road that led there.
“Anyone would think it was a palace nobody uses.”
Janice’s words fit perfectly.
But sadly, in this ruin of a place lived the Third Prince of the kingdom, and furthermore the legitimate eldest son of the king and the former queen, who had once been the object of the kingdom’s admiration.
“Still, it’s where a prince lives, so the inside of the palace must be well kept, right? I’m so looking forward to it!”
Unlike me, who had come to the palace now and then with my father, Janice was visiting the palace for the first time, and she was excited.
I indifferently ignored Janice’s fantasies and expectations about the palace. It seemed I would not be able to meet her expectations today.
The closer we got to the palace, the louder grew the sound of Janice’s expectations crashing to pieces. The palace was in a state that could not be called maintained even as a polite exaggeration.
So the road was the part that had been looked after.
The lawn in the garden before the palace was so thickly overgrown that it would not have been strange for a snake to leap out at any moment.
The grass, grown up to knee height and lush on both sides, made me afraid to step forward.
They threw it away.
The palace, and the prince.
The king takes no interest in Cassion, Dayson is busy tormenting him, and Julia, his stepmother, would never look after him.
At the pathetic conduct of the adults, my face burned, even though only my soul was the twenty-one-year-old adult.
I never thought it was this bad. I knew Dayson tormented him, but… this is too much!
It wasn’t only the king and the queen who looked down on Cassion.
I remembered the looks the attendants had given him whenever Cassion passed by in the past. Looks soaked through with a thin contempt.
The poor upkeep of the palace might not have been anyone’s order, but a choice made by the attendants themselves.
The less power a person had, the more nimbly they moved in response to wherever power went. They knew Cassion had been abandoned and could not find a reason to care.
Confirming that Cassion had been cast aside by the king, by the royal family, and even by the palace attendants made me feel awful.
A heavy stone settled in my chest.
“My lady, come this way.”
Janice pulled me along.
There was a path where she pointed. A thin path barely packed down by someone’s footsteps.
It’s not even an event, but the more I peel, the more there is.
The closer I got to the Third Prince’s Palace, the greater my disappointment grew.
There was not even a single knight guarding the palace. It was only because Dayson and Julia had not sent assassins that he was still alive; had they sent one, Cassion could have died right now.
I’ll need to find him a bodyguard, too.
The name of a highly skilled knight came to mind. A man with unusual interests who would be hard to win over for anyone but me, with my knowledge of the future, and who would not betray easily.
Where could that person be right now?
“It looks haunted! Wow, there are tons of rats.”
Janice’s fuss brought me back to my senses, and I carefully looked over the Third Prince’s Palace.
The huge palace, untouched by human hands, was dreary. It gave off an ominous air, enough that I would have believed a ghost appeared there in broad daylight.
By the way, how does Janice know there are lots of rats when she can’t even see any?
“My lady, they say hardly anyone comes here.”
Janice spoke as though she had heard it from someone.
There was nobody here besides the two of us, yet she talked that way. I didn’t mind much, but it was a habit that anyone else hearing it would point out as strange.
“Wait a moment, my lady.”
She trotted off toward a dead old tree. Then she muttered at the tree for quite a while.
I was about to say something about it, but over that sight, the image of Janice at the execution ground, risking her life to defend me, overlapped.
A little eccentricity is cute. Of course it is.
Even that sight, which would have made anyone else recoil, just looked cute to me. I let go of the thought of saying anything and approached the door.
Janice came skipping back and opened the door without hesitation, saying,
“My lady, they say nobody guards this place.”
“It’s a prince’s palace. Does it make sense that nobody’s here?”
I said, pushing Janice aside. Janice mumbled, “But it’s true,” but even if it was true, I didn’t want to believe it.
If it was true, it meant Cassion was living alone in this desolate, dreary palace.
But unfortunately, what Janice said was true.
I pushed open the rusty, stiff door and stepped inside, but there were still hardly any signs of people.
All alone in this huge palace.
Nobody would know even if he died.
I even risked being discovered and called out to ask whether anyone was there, but no answer came.
For some reason, I felt hurried.
In his childhood, Cassion had been too weak to go outside. I knew that he mostly stayed inside the palace, and if the palace was like this…
My steps, which I had started carefully, gradually grew faster.
And when I reached the top floor, a voice came to my ears.
“Cassion, you can’t even solve this?”
It sounded younger than I remembered, but it was a voice I knew.
“Ha, have you already forgotten what I taught you? I said you could solve it if you only knew simple arithmetic.”
The tone that ignored and looked down on the other person was not unfamiliar either.
“As expected, you’re hopeless. You’d be better off not studying at all. Studying clearly isn’t for you.”
As he spoke, the man with the familiar voice let out heavy sighs between his words.
“I told you. It’s something a prince should naturally be able to do. You’re no good at swordsmanship, you’ve got weak stamina, honestly… Have you memorized all the Ibrael conversation yet?”
If I were Cassion, I would have kicked that man in the shin about now.
“What? You couldn’t even do that? Then just don’t do anything, you. It won’t work out anyway, so it’s better not to try.”
Cassion wasn’t putting on a one-man show to hurt himself, so this was someone trying to crush Cassion’s spirit.
His malicious nature showed in a voice that mocked while pretending to care for the other.
I recognized the culprit at once.
Dayson, that rotten bastard!
I had long known that Dayson disapproved of Cassion.
But this was the first time I had come face to face with him tormenting him so openly.
“I’ll go for today, so see you next time. Next time I’ll bring something to study that suits your level.”
Judging from the conversation, it seemed the harassment of Cassion had been going on continuously.
I got angry just hearing it for a moment, and Cassion had been listening to this all along?
Get angry!
Without realizing it, I clenched both fists. I wished Cassion would swing a fist, or at least shout.
“Thank you, Brother…”
But the words that came out of Cassion’s mouth were quite different from my expectations.
Good heavens, how can he say thank you after hearing that?
Had he already grown so used to Dayson’s words that he didn’t even know that what Dayson said was cruel?
“I’m going now, so stay put. And don’t go making a fuss about exercising.”
There was the sound of Dayson saying his last goodbye and coming out.
I had to hide. I couldn’t run into Dayson now. But where was Janice?
When I whipped my head around, Janice was looking down at me, who had been pressing my ear to the door, with a curious look. I quickly snatched Janice’s wrist. I opened the door on the opposite side from Cassion’s room and shoved us both in.
“My lady, what are you doing here… mmph!”
“Shh, Janice.”
Janice’s eyes went round. I ignored her eyes, brimming with interest, and waited until Dayson’s footsteps faded.
“He’s gone.”
Even after Dayson’s footsteps had completely vanished, I waited a good while longer.
I still couldn’t run into Dayson. If he found out I was interested in Cassion, there was no telling what Dayson might do.
He might torment Cassion even worse, or he might suddenly take an interest in me.
In my last life, it was only after Count Kolkos became my guardian that he took an interest in me, but there was no harm in being careful ahead of time.
Dayson is greedy, so if I show interest in Cassion, he might start paying attention to me.
Being tangled up with him was the one thing I wanted to avoid.
“My lady, are we playing detective?”
Janice, who had been patiently quiet, asked.
I was dumbfounded seeing Janice enjoying the situation. Better than panicking and making a fuss, though.
I let go of Janice.
“More to the point, who was that? Who did you just avoid?”
“I won’t tell you.”
Explaining everything from why I came to this palace to Dayson would take more than a day. And if I dug into the details, there’d be nothing to say.
“Hmph, you don’t have to tell me, I can figure it all out anyway.”
Janice muttered at some spot on the wall again. It was a scene that wrinkled my brow on its own.
She’s cute, but isn’t that some kind of illness?
“It was a prince. But the prince who just left doesn’t have much of a personality, does he?”
…How did she know that?
I was very curious, but what was urgent right now was Cassion.
“Let’s go, Janice.”
I flung the door open.
In the corridor, beyond that wooden door, was my future husband.
Cassion let out a sigh. He could not take his eyes off the seat where Dayson had sat.
His damp, glistening eyes and slumped shoulders brought to mind a kitten that had lost its mother. He looked just that pitiful and forlorn.
“Bastard.”
But the change from that image to a venomous beast took only a moment.
His gentle eyes lifted up chillingly. Harsh curses poured out from between his fair red lips.
“What about brains for studying?”
Cassion leafed through the books Dayson had left behind, then shoved them under the desk.
He wanted to hurl them out the window, but he did not even have that much strength.
“Damn this body!”
Huffing in uncontainable fury, Cassion flopped onto the sofa, gasping for breath.
Dayson’s words lingered in his ears. The words said in pretended concern were eating away at Cassion.
He wanted to grab Dayson by the collar and shake him up and down, but as Dayson had said, he was a weakling who could not even lift a sword properly.
Even if he had the strength, he would not have been able to stand up to Dayson, who tormented him.
Dayson, favored by the king and the queen, and himself, abandoned. He could picture the outcome of a fight between the two before his eyes.
In the end, all Cassion could do was mutter to himself in self-mockery.
“Even pretending to be an idiot is hard.”
