Chesa stood at the summit of the tallest tower in the palace, looking down at Nadirotsa.
From up here, everything receded into the remote and small.
The grey citadel. The low-roofed houses. The river that had travelled from some distant place to cut through the heart of Nadirotsa. The arched bridges. The people moving in the streets below. All of it was his.
He was the king of this country.
Chesa had been born a prince, raised to be a king, and become one.
Whether he had wanted it was beside the point. In this land, as a rule, a person’s fate was fixed at birth, and fixed fates were rarely overturned.
It was no different for princes.
A prince, generally speaking, met one of two ends.
Death. Or the throne.
The man who had chosen the throne instead of the coffin surveyed all that had been given to him with eyes of complete transparency. An autumn wind ruffled his crow-black hair and bared his clean forehead.
“Your Majesty. I have a report on the investigation.”
Captain of the Royal Guard Skalts Petaora approached the king’s back. Chesa did not turn.
“Speak.”
“There is nothing, Your Majesty.”
Skalts’s voice was grave.
“No one who claims to have known the woman as a child. No midwife who attended the birth. She might as well have fallen from the sky.”
“So the infant the pair are keeping is indeed our daughter.”
Chesa stated it as fact. Skalts inclined his head. Then he raised the matter that had been reported to him by the surveillance detail recently assigned to Sarg and “Hys.”
“There is, however, one detail worth noting. Several days ago, the woman travelled to the gateway city and visited a number of antiquities dealers and jewellers, giving the name Lin Verche.”
“Lin Verche?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Tell me more.”
“According to the jeweller, this person visits once every several years and purchases only the most expensive items. Rumour holds that she is a wealthy landowner from the frontier regions—though the details are still under investigation.”
Chesa pressed his fingers to his temple and fell into thought. An unidentified wealthy woman with a face like Hyderlin’s…
A maternal relative, perhaps?
But Chesa and Hyderlin’s mother had been a palace maidservant—not a prosperous country landholder. Which would mean her mother before her had been a maidservant too, and her mother before that.
Skalts ventured carefully:
“Your Majesty… what do you think of consulting a sorcerer?”
“A sorcerer? Whatever for?”
“I cannot bring myself to believe that someone so identical to Countess Biche could exist by mere coincidence. Not without some form of magic at work. In my humble opinion, it seems possible that whoever this woman is, she used sorcery to copy the Countess’s face and then approached Lord Sarg Gloriosa under false pretences.”
“I didn’t take you for a man who would bring up sorcerers, Skalts.”
Chesa laughed faintly.
If it were truly possible to change one’s face with magic, every self-conscious noble in the kingdom would have long since summoned a sorcerer and had the job done. Skalts surely knew that. And yet here he was, raising the subject anyway—which Chesa found more amusing than he let on.
“Is she really that similar to Countess Biche, then?”
“…If you were to see her yourself, Your Majesty, I think you would be startled.”
Skalts’s reaction was too serious to dismiss entirely—there was something overwrought about it that gave Chesa pause. The king raised an eyebrow.
“Very well. Investigate to the best of your ability.”
His loyal captain withdrew.
The king was left alone at the top of the palace’s grey tower.
Chesa leaned out and looked into the far distance. The city far below looked like a scale model, a toy. A carriage moved along one of the streets. Somewhere inside that maze, the people who had hidden his daughter were moving among the crowds.
“How absurd,” he murmured, resting his chin in his hand.
“She has my sister’s face and my sister’s name. She’s carrying my child. And she’s with him.”
“What in the world are you after?”
Over the past several days, Hyderlin had worked her way through four men and relieved them of everything they owned. Without the need for sleep, the robberies themselves were almost effortless.
What was considerably more troublesome was shaking the surveillance the king had placed on her.
The royal guard assigned to tail her was nothing if not tenacious. He had dogged her with such relentless focus that she had spent most of her time simply trying to lose him.
“Whoever raised you certainly did their job well.”
Of course—she had raised him herself.
Having now memorised the faces of everyone who’d been set to watch her, Hyderlin surveyed the harvest of her own past efforts with considerable satisfaction.
“Sarg. What do you think?”
With the funds she’d acquired from burgling the men’s homes, Hyderlin had purchased a table and a chair, which she now hauled into Sarg’s house. Sarg looked up at the sudden arrival of furniture, one eyebrow raised.
“What’s all this? Where did a dining table come from?”
“We’ll be here for at least a week—we may as well live comfortably.”
“The usual custom, before moving furniture into someone’s home, is to ask the owner’s permission.”
“It’s a purchase that benefits you too, so why bother asking?”
“You’re really…fine. Fine. Do whatever you like.”
“I also bought bedding. Goose down. It’s getting cold at night—Princess can’t be sleeping under those thin blankets or she’ll catch a chill.”
Sarg looked over, somewhat involuntarily, at the royal infant on the bed. She was bundled in the feather quilt and looked absurdly content. There was also a toy in her hand that hadn’t been there before.
“…Did you buy that toy as well?”
“Mm-hm. Cute, isn’t it? Here—this one’s for you. Play with her.”
Hyderlin held out a baby rattle toward Sarg. He took it with an expression somewhere between resignation and reluctant compliance and gave it a shake. Princess Beronis squealed with delight and reached for it.
That is extremely satisfying, Hyderlin thought, and broke into a smile.
“I actually wanted to buy a house, but I didn’t quite have enough for that.”
Sarg let out a long groan and pressed his fingers against his forehead.
Hyderlin poured the proceeds of her robberies onto the table with a cheerful clatter of coins. She began to sort them with a whistling nonchalance that was vaguely reminiscent of a miserly moneylender doing inventory.
“Still quite a lot left over. We can buy clothes, shoes, a ring, a brooch, a belt—”
“…”
“Your wardrobe is practically bare—I had a look. We’re making an appearance at the palace after all. May as well make an impression. Pity the budget’s not more generous.”
“Hold on—”
“Since we’re posing as a married couple, we’ll need rings. I’d prefer white gold, but that seems to be out of reach at the moment. We can make do with gold…”
“Where exactly did that money come from?”
Sarg had slept soundly through Hyderlin’s nightly excursions and known nothing of them. She smiled pleasantly.
“I stole it.”
Sarg’s eyes narrowed.
“Your conscience… does it actually exist?”
“I only robbed the ones who beat you up, so save the lecture. You should be thanking me for extracting perfectly reasonable damages on your behalf—not maligning me. I’m deeply disappointed in you.”
Hyderlin swept a portion of the coins into a pouch and slid it across the table toward Sarg.
“Here. That share is yours.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Take it while I’m offering. I know you’re short on money.”
A short silence.
“…Who said I was short on money? I have plenty for myself.”
Hyderlin looked slowly around the room and gave a small shrug.
“And yet a man with plenty lives here?”
“I’ve been staying here because it’s the only place with a clear view of your grave—your fake grave. My assets held in my name are perfectly intact.”
“Is that so. How much are we talking, in total?”
“Why on earth are you curious about someone else’s finances?”
“Married couples shouldn’t keep secrets from each other.”
Hyderlin, who was herself one of the most secretive people alive, said this with complete shamelessness. Sarg frowned.
“…Go take your vows with me at the cathedral and I’ll tell you.”
It was impossible to tell whether he was joking.
“Let’s agree to keep secrets forever.”
Hyderlin answered without hesitation. And somehow, an inexplicable chill ran down her spine at her own words.
They had been managing reasonably well—getting on with each other day by day, faces merely inches apart, without incident—but moments like this crept up and made things complicated.
He had confessed. She had not merely declined, she had refused him.
Under any normal circumstances, Hyderlin would have arranged never to see Sarg privately again after something like that. But circumstances were anything but normal. With eyes watching them everywhere, they would have to keep living in each other’s pockets for the next several weeks.
And so Hyderlin had been behaving as if she had never heard his confession, and Sarg had been behaving as if he had never received her refusal.
It had worked, more or less—they’d managed to get through each day without making things awkward. But every so often, when he said something like that, something in her chest gave a dull and unwelcome lurch.
This is exactly why I shouldn’t have let myself be seen. It only makes things strange between us.
The whole situation was not to Hyderlin’s liking.
She had, in the course of all this, witnessed a lowness in Sarg she would never have seen otherwise. And he had, in turn, glimpsed a vulnerability in her she had no business showing anyone. She was unhappy about both.
The second, at least, was slightly easier to bear. Her life had an end point that was now clearly visible. A life that was almost over had no use for pride or appearances.
It was Sarg’s future—the one that would continue after she was gone—that concerned her.
When I go back under the ground… how will he live?
She had no right to direct his life, of course. No obligation to compensate for the wreckage hers had left in its wake. But she couldn’t help wanting to restore him to where he had been—to the life he was meant to have.
That was simply how she loved people.
She didn’t ask for it to go both ways. It was enough to stand behind someone and watch them walk forward. Just to know they were moving in the right direction.
She had no intention of walking alongside him, hand in hand. She was soaked in blood and dirt and all manner of filth. If she gave in to the selfishness of reaching for his hand, she would only drag that filth onto him.
She had no desire to do that.
And yet he had not merely reached for her hand—he had tried to embrace her entirely. Even if I’m tarnished by it, even if people point and whisper—as long as you face me, as long as you hold me back, I don’t care. That was what his actions seemed to say.
Did he think she would actually hold him back? That would be nothing but selfishness dressed up as love—not affection, not devotion. Just a person feeding their own hunger.
There might be those who would say: so long as we’re together, I don’t mind the mud, I don’t mind the shame. But Hyderlin was not that kind of romantic. She had never been.
Power and honour and a life that amounted to something—those came first. Romance could wait until after.
And so Hyderlin’s way was this: push him away. Scrub him clean. Provoke his contempt by any means necessary—threats, harshness, whatever it took. Make him dislike her thoroughly enough that he stopped looking back and started walking forward again, back onto the path that was meant for him.
It was, when seen clearly, a profoundly selfish kind of devotion.
“Hey, Sarg.”
She opened her mouth, a little awkwardly.
“What.”
“Once we’ve dealt with Chesa—what then? Are you going to stay here and live like this?”
“What are you going to do?”
The question came back as a question. Hyderlin’s expression soured.
“I asked you first. You answer.”
