“True to that oath—my sister was a loyal knight to the last.”
Past tense.
“To think that the same sister would betray me and try to poison the queen… even the most far-sighted prophet could never have foreseen it.”
He knew, as he said it, that Hyderlin had done no such thing.
Whatever lightness had remained in Hyderlin’s expression was now completely gone. An old bitterness she had kept carefully buried came welling up.
“Why are you telling me this?”
Chesa stepped closer. One span of distance remained between them—an intimate distance, the kind allowed only between people who were close.
“You truly do look just like her. Startlingly so. Your height is similar. Even your eyes… the very same colour.”
The younger brother who had once meant more to her than almost anyone looked at Hyderlin with his coal-black eyes. What lived in them was curiosity, and a faint thread of excitement, and beneath both of those—fear.
The king was afraid of “Hys.”
“Looking at you, I keep thinking of my sister who is gone… I keep reaching for old memories.”
Old memories.
The king’s crime.
What would it feel like—to be confronted by the exact face of someone you killed?
Hyderlin did not know. But Chesa did.
Have you come to take your revenge on me?
Chesa staggered back—a stumbling, retreating motion, as if he were trying to flee from something. He turned away from her. Hyderlin watched his back.
He hid his fear behind the turning and faced the wall.
“My sister… would probably never forgive me.”
Hyderlin had died at twenty-seven and was twenty-seven still. Chesa had killed her at twenty-five, and was now twenty-nine.
She looked at the back of a brother who had grown older than his own eldest sister.
She looked at the back of the person who had made her forever twenty-seven.
She looked at the unguarded, exposed back of the man she had come here to make forever twenty-nine.
Hyderlin’s hand curled into a fist, and then unclenched.
Is now the moment?
There was no servant here. No guard. No one but Chesa and Hyderlin.
If she crossed to him now, wrapped her arm around his throat, compressed the artery there—it would be over. Or she could twist his neck. Or seize him by the head and drive it into the stone candlestick on the altar.
There were many ways. People died so easily. She could simply choose one and see it through.
And then confess to being the king’s killer. End it all right here.
But she didn’t move.
“It may sound absurd—but I miss her. Even now.”
Because the moment he said those words, an old question she had never stopped asking rose up inside her again with renewed force.
Why did you betray me?
I gave you everything. I swore every oath I had to give. I kept nothing from you. I gave you whatever you asked for, every time you asked. Why did you throw me away like that?
She had to hear the reason.
Hyderlin asked in a voice that frayed at the edges:
“Forgive my presumption—but I find it somewhat difficult to understand. You miss the person who tried to kill your queen?”
Chesa’s shoulders drew in slightly.
“…She was my only family. Sentencing her to death felt like cutting away my own flesh.”
Liar. He had been smiling. He had told her he knew she was innocent—and he had been smiling.
“Forgive me for making you uncomfortable. The death of family is simply something I cannot seem to forget.”
Chesa turned back to face her. A pale, faded smile had settled onto his expression.
“Now—can you see the figure in the central window there? That is Saint Marcelina herself. I’m sure you’ve heard the story of her miracles…”
Margarite and Sarg had once been closer to each other than to anyone else in the world. But four years ago, in the wake of Countess Biche’s execution, the fault lines between them had widened until at last everything collapsed.
It had happened the year after the execution, sometime in early autumn.
Sarg had been causing an increasingly erratic kind of disruption—fixated on clearing Countess Biche’s name—and had finally resigned from the Holy Knights.
The Grand Master, who felt sorry for Sarg, had gone to the queen and asked her to reason with him. At that point Sarg was still, technically, Margarite’s knight—that was how things stood on paper, at least, however much he had been neglecting his duties. It wasn’t something that could simply be ignored.
“Lord Sarg Gloriosa. Thank you for coming.”
Sarg entered the inner chamber. Margarite dismissed the ladies-in-waiting and handmaids who had been seated around her—a concession to the difficulty of moving freely, since she was carrying her second child.
The queen who had been called a living saint and the knight who had been called the Radiant sat across from each other.
“Lord Sarg. I’ve heard that you’ve resigned from the Holy Knights.”
There was a faint smell of alcohol on him. His steps were slightly uneven. He must have shaved in a shaking hand—there was a small cut on his cheek, and a spot of soap foam he hadn’t noticed.
Margarite bit the inside of her lip.
“Please don’t decide too quickly. Think it over again. It would be such a waste of all those years.”
Sarg exhaled—the slow, tired exhale of a man who had grown weary of being talked out of things.
“Is that what you asked me here to say?”
“…”
“I’m afraid there will be no reversal of the resignation. And even if I remained—it would make little difference in the end. They would expel me or defrock me before long.”
There were already those among the more extreme members calling for his excommunication. Margarite clutched her skirt in both hands.
“Then I’ll take my leave.”
Sarg rose. The movement was heavy, as if he were carrying something on his shoulders that had no physical form.
Why are you behaving as though the whole world has ended?
Margarite trembled—and spoke.
“You wanted to rise as high as you could go.”
Her voice became an iron clasp around the man’s ankle. Sarg stood arrested, like a prisoner mid-step.
“A few more years and you would have been Grand Master. After that, it was only a matter of time before Cardinal. Why are you giving up all of that now?”
“…”
“Is it because of her?”
“…”
“Because of your Hyderlin?”
Margarite spoke the name in a thin, fragile voice.
The prisoner looked at the floor for a long moment, as if trying to identify what exactly it was that had closed around his ankle. Regret, it was. And guilt. And a sense of responsibility he had never managed to set down. All the things Sarg had carried since the day he became Margarite’s knight.
Sarg lifted his head. The grey of his eyes was dark with something without a name.
“That is none of your concern.”
“Do you actually mean to say you’re still angry about what happened to Countess Biche? That you’re this torn up over her execution?”
Sarg had changed after Hyderlin was sentenced—slowly, steadily, irreversibly. Margarite’s grip on her skirt tightened until her knuckles went white.
“How could you do this to me? She tried to kill me.”
“Hyderlin was innocent. She was framed.”
“You want to believe that. The evidence was overwhelming—you’re the only one still refusing to accept it.”
Margarite swallowed. In spite of every effort to hold herself together, her eyes shone with tears she was fighting to contain.
“You know that the p-poison she gave me—that it caused my child to—” Her voice broke. “—to be lost. You know that.”
Margarite had collapsed after ingesting the poison. When she woke, three weeks had passed, and Hyderlin had been executed.
She had been stunned. She had known how much the king trusted his Captain of the Guard.
I thought she was above the law, she had thought, bewildered. And yet here she is, dead by it.
Chesa had come to Margarite and wept—told her he was sorry he had failed to protect her from Countess Biche. He had sobbed.
And watching his face—that weeping, wrecked face—something in her had, strangely, softened. She had never seen him like this before. She had pulled him into her arms. He had pressed his face against her and cried.
A few days later, Margarite had discovered she was pregnant. Six weeks along. Chesa told her it was entirely her decision—to keep it or not.
She had decided to keep it.
But her body, weakened by the poison, had not been able to hold the child. The baby had died at two months.
“And yet you keep defending that woman to my face. How could you?”
After the miscarriage, Margarite had blamed Hyderlin for a long, long time. So the conflict with Sarg—who maintained her innocence throughout—was inevitable.
The friction had eased somewhat during Margarite’s second pregnancy, only to return in full.
Sarg spoke with an absence of feeling that somehow hurt more than anger would have.
“She was framed, so I am saying she was framed. The one who gave you the poison was not Hyderlin. It was someone else. And Chesa knew that, and framed her, and had her killed.”
“Now you’re blaming Chesa? Try to think rationally. He had no reason to do such a thing!”
“And you’re defending him now?”
A faint heat had entered Sarg’s voice.
“You were better when you hated him. At least then you weren’t saying things this foolish.”
“Sak!”
Margarite screamed. She seized the fabric of her skirt in her small hands. Her chest was shaking.
“Don’t say things like that. I was so unhappy then.”
“And now you’re happy?”
Margarite placed her hands over her stomach.
“He loves me. He doesn’t torment me the way someone else once did.”
“So you’ve decided to look away from the truth, because the happiness is worth it.”
“Sarg. This is the truth.”
Sarg laughed without humour. She was choosing not to see it, even with the evidence right in front of her.
And so he said something that came from somewhere deeper than argument.
“I can’t stand that the two of you are happy.”
Margarite could not believe what she had just heard. What had he just said?
Sarg looked down. The man’s voice was soft and flat, like something read off a page—but what it said came from somewhere very dark.
“You are happy because she is gone. I am unhappy because she is gone. And you walk around as if that’s perfectly fine. It makes me ill.”
“…”
“I want you both to be unhappy.”
The tears that had been held back in Margarite’s eyes finally gave way and ran down her face.
“Sak.”
Sarg could not bring himself to look at it. He lowered his head helplessly.
Regret. Guilt. The responsibility he couldn’t put down. The weight of being Margarite’s knight, worn so long it had become part of him.
In a few words, he severed all of it.
“Your Highness. It has been an honour to serve you. I hereby tender my resignation as your personal knight.”
When he raised his head, his face was composed—the same unreadable calm it had always been.
“I pray you will know peace, alongside your king.”
That was their last meeting.
Sarg gathered his things and disappeared.
A few months later, quiet word reached the palace that he had been seen in the outskirts of Nadirotsa. Several nobles had made their way to him—looking for a skilled, unattached knight to bring into their service—and every one of them had been turned away.
