Lyussenford was bitterly cold, its vast territory defined by the rugged mountain ranges of the empire’s north. By late October, snow would already be falling in earnest.
That day was no exception. Not even the sturdiest horses could traverse the path to the northern tower, which stood isolated from Lyussenford Castle. The Grand Duke was forced to run the final stretch on foot, battling a blizzard so fierce that the snow did not pile upon the ground but whipped through the air like frozen shrapnel.
She must be alive. Even though he was the one who had locked her away, he clung to the hope. He had never ordered her death; therefore, she had to be alive.
That woman. His wife, thrust upon him by the Emperor. The daughter of the Duke of Ostain, the Grand Duchess of Lyussenford, or perhaps, he had once believed, the Emperor’s spy.
‘She isn’t a spy. She wasn’t one.’
The conviction—or perhaps the brainwashing—that had clouded his mind for over twenty years shattered. It was a curse so virulent it could only be broken by a catastrophe. He trembled, hit by the force of a belated, devastating realization.
He had verified, with what he believed to be indisputable evidence, that his wife was a spy, and he had personally handed down her punishment. Yet now, far too late, with the Emperor’s army at their doorstep, he had unearthed the truth. The real traitors had funneled secrets to the enemy and pinned every crime on her. Only when the truth became that horrific did the ban finally dissolve, breaking the curse that had held his senses captive.
Leaving the burning ruins of Lyussenford Castle behind, he ran to save her. He had nothing left to lose. He shoved the door that had been locked from the outside. It should have been immovable, but it swung open with ease, as if mocking him.
The moment it flew open, the Grand Duke felt, yet again, that something was terribly wrong.
“……Be—……Kaella, Kaella!”
The name he had never once properly uttered throughout their marriage was coughed up like hazy, gray ash. It had been impossible to say; now, it felt unnervingly, shamelessly familiar. He had called it in his mind a thousand times.
“Kaella!”
The Grand Duke lunged into the room. Blood dripped heavily in his wake. The dilapidated door had been a futile barrier. Even if she were frail, even if she were a woman who lived with illness, she should have been able to escape. She should have left.
A stench assaulted him.
“Kaella……”
He intended to tell the figure lying on the cot to get up. If she couldn’t stand, he would carry her. Kaella—the wife he had ignored and dismissed, convinced she was an imperial informant—was impossibly small.
“Kael……!”
But the woman, who remained motionless despite the giant of a man entering in clanking armor, stared back with wide, sightless eyes. Her arms, exposed to the biting cold, were frozen a deep, bruised blue. Her once-lustrous platinum hair had fallen out in patches from malnutrition, and her gaunt face was ruined. Kaella, only twenty-five, lay on her side, little more than bone.
It was a corpse of his own making. She had died looking at the door, her only escape, curled up because she had not been fed for so long.
The daughter of the Duke of Ostain, in whose veins flowed royal blood, was dead. Peon, who had seen enough corpses to grow weary of them, recognized the cause immediately: starvation. She had withered away from the cold and lack of sustenance. He had not ordered her food to be cut off, but Lyussenford had collapsed so completely that it defied even his commands.
They had wanted her dead, even if it meant betraying him.
“Oh my. She’s dead.”
Peon turned his bloodshot eyes toward the entrance. Beatrice Lavalle, her silver hair disheveled, stood there, panting.
She was his first love, his childhood friend, the woman with whom he had shared dreams. She was the reason Kaella had been cast aside.
“Starved to death. Poor thing. And she was completely innocent.”
Beatrice Lavalle was the vanguard sent under the Emperor’s order to arrest a traitor. Or rather, she was a horse the Emperor had used to keep Peon in check before disposing of her.
“The noble and righteous Grand Duke starved an innocent Grand Duchess to death? Is this the justice you spoke of, Peon? You said an innocent person should never die. What exactly was our Kaella’s crime?”
Words often hurt more than steel. Staggered by the attack, Peon couldn’t reply. He stared at his wife, who hadn’t even been able to properly close her eyes. So young, so delicate, she had died with not a single part of her left whole.
“You’re a hypocrite. A fool. If you were truly as noble as you claim, you shouldn’t have spewed that you loved me after marrying her.”
The woman he had whispered words of love to criticized him, then let out a sharp, amused, “Oh my.”
“Ah, I was the one who made you do that, wasn’t I?”
Why would an aristocratic lady, seemingly unassociated with war, lead the vanguard? In her hand, she held a dagger stained with blood and glowing with a cold, blue light. Red smoke swirled around the blade.
It was bizarre. To be bizarre was to be a sorceress of strange powers. The pitch-black poison that had filled Peon’s mind dripped from her lips.
“What a pity. You were my first experiment and my most painstaking spell. It was the simplest ban I ever built, designed to be sturdy enough never to break.”
Now that it had broken, he realized she was right; it had been remarkably simple. He had protected Beatrice because he believed he loved her. She was the flower of society, and every time they met, she would repeat, ‘Peon, you must not betray me. You must protect me. I love you.’ Those three phrases were the hooks of the spell that had secured the ban.
“Peon, you mustn’t betray me. I protected you while fawning over Vincent in Krain!”
With those words, the poisonous smoke flowing from her red lips reached toward Peon. It had been like this the whole time.
Peon swept the smoke away with a gust of wind from his sword. The spell, having lost its power, vanished like a hollow lie. Beatrice was powerless against him now.
Why had the Emperor insisted on sending her? She was no longer useful; she was meant to die by Peon’s hand. Her face twisted hideously.
“What was the problem? I manufactured the evidence that she was a spy and sent it to you myself! You locked her here. That should have been enough! You should have kept your head down and stayed quiet; why be so impudent as to prepare for war?”
Beatrice ranted, but Peon ignored her. With the fog in his mind cleared, the cold reality of his surroundings came into full view.
He untied his tattered cloak. His seven-years-younger wife was too small. She looked absurdly powerless, too weak to be an enemy.
“Why would a blockhead like you even think of rebelling! If that girl had just fiddled around and disappeared on her own, you should have lived your life! I went through the trouble of playing your best friend, and you dare ignore me?”
Peon reached out to close Kaella’s eyes.
“You were supposed to look only at me! If I placed a ban on you, you should have just kept your mouth shut and obeyed! Why did you waver for that stupid girl?”
The sinful husband could not even hold a funeral. Peon covered Kaella with his cloak, stained with the blood of others and his own. Her ragged clothes offended him. He could not hand her body over to the encroaching Imperial army, but there was no time to cremate her.
“You’re a dirty bastard, and your taste is cheap, too. Just like your mother, one isn’t enough for you? A test subject under a ban, yet you dare push me away? Know your place. A wretch like you should have been grateful that I offered to sleep with you!”
The catastrophe had come because a man who should never have refused, refused. Nothing but viciousness remained for the shrieking Beatrice. She knew this was her end, too.
Peon took grim satisfaction in the fact that Beatrice had not gotten what she wanted.
“Should I have placed the ban even tighter? I should have put an even tighter leash on you since it would end up like this!”
Peon gripped his sword as the Imperial army poured in behind Beatrice. He had been branded a traitor; there was nowhere to retreat.
“Your family is finished. The daughter-in-law is dead, the son will die, and your father doesn’t know a thing….”
At that moment, a massive cry sounded from afar. It was a roar of pure, unadulterated fury. Beatrice, who had been spouting nonsense, turned pale.
“Doesn’t know….”
It was the sound of a rampaging evil dragon.
The Grand Duke of Lyussenford, who had faced evil dragons before, did not run to stop it but instead slashed at the enemies in front of him. There was nothing left but to fight until death. In the distance, the roar grew louder. Arrows and spears poured down like rain.
･ ｡ﾟ✧: *. ꕥ .* :✧ﾟ. ･
“Are you heading to see His Majesty?”
It had just happened. Something that existed in his memory but was unknown to anyone in this world, an event that had not occurred. Therefore, the daughter of the Duke of Ostain, who had jumped right in front of him, was a stranger.
She was not the Grand Duchess of Lyussenford, not the Emperor’s spy whom his precious Beatrice had testified against, and not a wife whose heart had been bruised by neglect. Much less was she the woman who had died of starvation. The sin only he remembered was his alone to bear; it had nothing to do with the lady before him.
Yet, his eyes scanned her, lingering. Were her cheeks filling out? She was healthy, as she should be, but she looked deathly pale. He was curious, even without a shred of decency.
“I, I also have an urgent matter to convey to Father. I don’t know what this is, but I will deliver it in his stead.”
Her youthful voice trembled. Small, soft hands clung to the heavy box the Grand Duke was holding. Kaella had no time and no excuses. The man in front of her was too fearsome. For someone as frail as her, a man as massive as a doorway was a threat just by existing, but she thought desperately.
‘An excuse. What excuse is there?’
She had no alternative other than to block him with her body. Inside the box was the pistol that had killed her father. If it fell into the Emperor’s hands, the Duke of Ostain would die, and Kaella would be stripped of her territory, sold to this man, framed, and eventually poisoned by her rival.
“I happened to see Lady Lavalle near the Aquitel Palace on my way here.”
Because Beatrice had been such an overwhelming presence during their four years of marriage, she was the only name that came to mind. It was a lie she told because she figured the Grand Duke would turn back for her.
She had always tried to be seen in a good light. She had believed that if she did her best as a Grand Duchess, she would be rewarded. But those feelings had vanished; she was simply struggling to carve out a place to survive. The sight of her groveling before Peon without a shred of pride was pathetic, yet it was her only choice.
“She seemed to be alone, but there were some gentlemen around her.”
Kaella grasped the box, concocting the lie. She would not let him enter while carrying that pistol. She could not bear to see that sight again.
She pushed this man—a man who had never once been her husband—toward the Emperor’s mistress. Whatever happened between them was none of her business.
“I think you could meet her if you go now; I will deliver this in your stead.”
As she babbled, Kaella pulled at the box. It did not budge. She looked up at the young Grand Duke.
“……I saw her just a while ago. Really, it hadn’t been more than a few minutes.”
So, the woman you are obsessed with is over there. Go quickly.
Why had she put so much effort into a man who wouldn’t treat her like a human being? This was a man who had warned her on their first wedding night—forced upon them after the Empress had been punished for his violent refusal to marry Kaella—to expect nothing and do nothing useless.
The man stared at her for a long time without blinking, as if he would devour her, then answered slowly.
“I am on my way back from seeing His Majesty.”
Kaella, immediately letting go of the box and grabbing her dress hem, darted into the garden. Anger boiled up. The husband she had treated with such sincerity was mocking her, and her father’s life was hanging by a thread.
“You must not enter without the Emperor’s permission, Kaella.”
The force pulling her back was strong. She looked back blankly. She didn’t think there was any need for such a dream to go on for long.
“It’s all right. I know that, too.”
Kaella smiled. She smiled because she knew the world would never be kind to her and that the only end was death.
The moment the arm holding her lost its strength at her smile, she ran again, as if flying, toward her fate.
“Kaella!”
It was an impudent act. Rudely shaking off his hand, daring to defy the Emperor’s summon—it was all forbidden. But Kaella crossed every taboo and ran into the garden.
Her mind raced. The protective magical tool she had begged her father to take would only work once. If she could drag her father out during a reload, perhaps they would survive. A quick death was better than the alternative.
“Kaella!”
She heard a low, desperate cry from behind, but nothing could stop her.
She ran through the dense shrubs. She reached the place where her father had died.
“What is the meaning of this?”
What Kaella saw was the Emperor, who had just lowered the pistol, and her father, who was deathly pale. He was alive.
‘The magical tool worked!’
The Emperor rolled his bulging eyes and glanced at Kaella. Despite having just pulled the trigger toward her father, he looked at them as if they were nothing more than an annoyance.
“Your Majesty. I apologize, but as this gift arrived a little late, I was returning to present it to Your Majesty.”
The Grand Duke, holding the heavy box, walked up quietly from behind.
The Emperor’s expression twisted. The pistol he had aimed at his brother’s head had been empty. The live ammunition was in the box Peon had brought.
What a dense, rustic fool! As if someone stuck in the north would know that gifting a pistol fully loaded with live ammunition was the Krain way of showing courtesy!
The Emperor looked at Kaella with annoyance. He could kill her just for being bothersome.
“And the young lady came running after hearing urgent news at the entrance together with me.”
The Grand Duke, mentioning news that even Kaella knew nothing about, lowered his head.
The Emperor looked at Kaella, waiting. However, a servant who had run up from behind answered instead.
“Your Majesty, Her Majesty the Empress……!”
At that moment, the Emperor’s face, full of nothing but boredom and arrogance, changed completely.
“Has lost consciousness!”
The Grand Duke just watched nonchalantly as the Emperor dropped the pistol and brushed past them. Kaella, who had intended to die right there, narrowed her eyes at the Emperor’s back.
‘What is this?’
In her memory, the Empress had never lost consciousness. Something had changed.
The Empress—the woman the insane Emperor was grotesquely obsessed with, and the Grand Duke’s mother—had lost consciousness.