Chapter 20

Chapter 20

Irenea, summoned to the palace by the Emperor, was shown at once to the Emperor’s private reception room.

“Her Majesty is currently in a council meeting, so please wait a moment.”

All the way in the carriage, Leonard had worried that he might have put her in the Emperor’s bad graces.

But if that had been the case, Irenea would never have been shown to a private reception room.

She would have been sent to the waiting hall shared by the other nobles and put on display, and she wouldn’t even have been told to wait “a moment.”

Nor would she have enjoyed the privilege of being served tea first.

So she let go of the slight tension she had been holding and sipped her tea at ease.

—A knock sounded at the door.

“Her Majesty approaches.”

Before she could even finish a cup of tea, the head lady-in-waiting announced the Emperor’s arrival.

The moment Irenea rose and straightened her clothes, the Emperor strode into the reception room with sharply lifted eyes.

Irenea bowed respectfully to the Emperor, who sat down across from her.

“Irenea Blair greets the Sun of the Empire.”

“Sit.”

With a careless wave in Irenea’s direction, the Emperor pressed a hand to her forehead as if she had a headache and let out a sigh.

A deep furrow cut between her brows.

Pretending not to see it, the head lady-in-waiting poured tea into the Emperor’s cup, and the ladies-in-waiting wheeled in a trolley and laid out fresh desserts.

“Everyone, out.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

Everyone in the palace knew that the Emperor doted on Marchioness Blair and always received her alone.

As the guard knights, the head lady-in-waiting, and the ladies-in-waiting left without a word, the Emperor let her rigidly upright back sag.

“Honestly, every last one of them treats the imperial treasury as their own emergency storehouse. Irenea, go somewhere and give a lecture on the happiness of the honest taxpayer.”

“I’d dearly love to collect a lecture fee, but that isn’t something anyone can teach. One has to come to it on one’s own.”

“Then teach me the secret of that awakening. I don’t ask for much. If I had just five more nobles who paid their taxes like you, no, three, I would have nothing left to wish for.”

At the Emperor’s groaning, Irenea laughed briefly, covering her mouth with her hand.

“My secret is too expensive. No one would want to buy it.”

Of course not. One would have to die and come back to life first.

“Do you sell even that at a high price, merchant that you are? Insolent girl.”

Though her tongue clicked in disapproval, the hand that pushed the dish of sweets toward Irenea, saying these were delicious, was tender.

Naturally, having just come from wrangling with people who never paid their taxes honestly and thought only of squeezing out money, claiming drought and landslides and poor tenants going hungry, the Emperor could not help but find Irenea especially lovely today.

Irenea was even grateful to them.

Yes, go on, irritate the Emperor even more! That way she’ll dote on me all the more!

“More importantly, Irenea, I trust you already know why I summoned you at such an early hour.”

The Emperor dropped newspapers onto the table, one, two, three, with a thud each time.

The headline of the topmost paper read as follows.

“The press is tearing at you in earnest. Here, read the article in this paper.”

The tone was visible from the headline alone.

There was no need to read the content, but since the Emperor told her to, Irenea unfolded the paper.

Of course, the only thing she read was the name of the press.

‘So this is one Duke William sponsors.’

If he was the sponsor, it was only natural that they would write an article attacking her this blatantly.

Duke William disliked Irenea very, very much.

“By now, I expect some of the nobles are putting their heads together with glee, thinking over what petition to submit to me.”

“They’ll probably petition that Your Majesty favors me so much that I’ve grown insolent and diminished the dignity of the imperial family.”

At Irenea’s answer, which flowed out as smoothly as water, the Emperor did not hide her displeasure.

“Knowing that perfectly well, you still did something to give them a handle? Why? Because you assumed I would naturally shield you?”

“How could that be? I know that Your Majesty cherishes me, and precisely because of that, I clearly distinguish between what I may do and what I may not. So I hope you will at least understand that this was not something I did without thought.”

“Not without thought?”

The Emperor tilted her chin, telling her to say, then, what she had been thinking.

Irenea opened her mouth quickly.

“When I first saw the Roelle Auction House’s catalog, I was quite shocked myself. Good heavens, my fiancé had put his family heirloom up for auction without so much as a word to me!”

“You’re telling me you knew nothing of your fiancé putting the heirloom up for auction?”

“Had I known, I would have stopped him. Putting a family heirloom of all things up for auction drags the family’s honor through the mud.”

“Fine, then. Why did your fiancé drag his family’s honor through the mud? Because of the family’s debts?”

If she knew that, it was as good as saying she knew all the minor facts.

Irenea went straight to the point.

“Well, it seems he was threatened into putting the heirloom up for auction. And by none other than His Highness the Second Prince.”

Even now, thinking of it, Irenea put on an expression of grievance and sorrow.

Whether because she had heard something unexpected or because she could not believe Irenea’s words, the Emperor’s brow narrowed slightly.

“Al made threats? Why would that boy make such a threat?”

“I couldn’t understand it at all either, so I looked into it separately. And what do you know, it turned out Young Lord Matthias was involved.”

“Young Lord Matthias?”

The Emperor knew thoroughly who belonged to the Crown Princess’s faction and to the Second Prince’s.

Of course, she did not know them for the same reason.

The Emperor had not added a single word while the Crown Princess built up her own faction.

She had not recommended anyone, nor had she made trouble over anyone she disliked.

She had simply watched.

In the Second Prince’s case, however, it was a little different.

The Emperor checked the faces of those the Second Prince kept at his side and trimmed away, as seemed fit, anyone she judged unsuitable.

Lloyd Matthias was also someone the Emperor had passed after deliberation, deciding it would be all right to let him play with her son.

Her standard was as follows.

Neither too lacking nor too outstanding.

“Lloyd Matthias… I remember that name precisely. Isn’t he the one who was knocked flat with a single punch in a duel with your fiancé? I recall that, thanks to that, a letter of complaint even went in asking whether the military academy’s graduation exam had been fair, and the academy’s principal had quite a headache.”

That was exactly Lloyd Matthias’s trait of being neither lacking nor outstanding.

“Yes. Lloyd Matthias harbors a grudge against my fiancé over that incident. On top of that, he proposed to me and was turned down… I suspect he may have heard of our engagement somewhere beforehand and schemed to humiliate us both.”

It had been only the day before yesterday that Irenea announced Leonard as her fiancé.

Before that, the two had had no connection, so however resourceful Matthias might be, it was impossible for him to have learned of the engagement in advance.

But since Irenea had begun preparing the banquet to announce her fiancé two months ago, the Emperor, assuming the two had already been engaged by then, found those words credible.

“So you’re saying that fellow used my son to take revenge on the two of you? An imperial prince of this empire?”

“You’ve heard what happened at the auction house, I trust? The other nobles, wary of His Highness the Second Prince, did not dare set a price in front of him, yet Young Lord Matthias called out a mere 110,000 larcs.”

The reason the others hadn’t bought the sword was that it looked far too worn.

Irenea knew that, yet she spun the story in the direction most favorable to her.

“What’s more, Young Lord Matthias even snickered as he watched no one raise a paddle. Your Majesty, I am truly aggrieved. It was Lloyd Matthias who used the Great Emperor’s renowned name solely to mock my fiancé.”

“Hah! And Al went along with such an absurd trick?”

At the Emperor’s frown, Irenea let her eyes droop as if disheartened.

Of course, it was an act.

“I don’t understand the reason either. But His Highness clearly saw the sword the Great Emperor left behind and still did not take part in the auction.”

If there had been no such scheme, there was no way the Second Prince would not have won the First Emperor’s sword.

Irenea had calculated that this argument would work on the Emperor.

The current Emperor revered the First Emperor more than anyone, and was therefore sincere in pursuing the First Emperor’s traces.

Sure enough.

“In a word, you… are saying that you took on a stain on your name only to protect your fiancé’s honor from the scheming of Lloyd Matthias and Al. Is that what you mean?”

“Yes. I could hardly ask His Highness the Second Prince why he had threatened my fiancé. It was the best I could do.”

At Irenea’s heartfelt words, the Emperor let out a heavy sigh.

“Why not tell me instead?”

“I would have, had I had proof. Honestly, even at this moment, I have none.”

Unfortunately, Selen had failed to secure proof.

It was because the Second Prince’s collusion with Matthias had taken place inside the palace.

Selen had said that infiltrating the palace was possible, but Irenea had talked her out of it.

If the Emperor ever found out that she had planted someone inside the palace, she would have no way to explain herself.

“Even so, the remaining circumstances tell me that the two truly did scheme together.”

Rather than nod, Irenea bowed her head deeply.

Looking at her, the Emperor sighed, then gulped down her iced tea as if to soothe her stifled chest.

“I know that Al summoned your fiancé to the palace. When I asked him why, he answered that he had simply wanted to hear a mercenary’s stories.”

He had suddenly grown curious about a mercenary’s stories and so called out a noble who had shut himself away in his own domain?

It was a truly shoddy excuse.

In truth, the Emperor had thought so too.

“Even so, do you know why I let it pass without prying?”

Irenea nodded.