Nigel stared intently at Ethan's face. Maybe the glasses he usually wore had blocked his view, so he'd never really seen it properly. Strangely enough, he thought, this was Ethan Lake's true face.
“...It's no use looking at me like that.”
Ethan murmured softly as he reached out and covered Nigel's eyes. With his vision cut off, only the cool touch of the palm and Ethan's heavy breathing stirred his senses.
“There's no way out of here for you tonight, Your Highness. All Lord Nigel needs to do is stay here quietly.”
“I'm not looking at you to beg for my life.”
How could that ever be the case? Even now, in a situation like this, Nigel hadn't the slightest intention of begging for his life. Gripping the wrist of the hand covering his eyes, he let a cracked voice escape from beyond Ethan's palm.
“I'm looking because it's laughable, thinking how long you must have endured me from behind, just waiting for this day to kill me...”
At Nigel's sneer, Ethan's hand trembled faintly. But he soon twisted his head aside and shook off the feeling welling up inside. He knew very well that Nigel spoke this way precisely to unsettle him.
“I'm relieved. That you're still yourself, even in a situation like this. In any case, I have no intention of letting you die.”
Ethan pressed his lips close to Nigel's ear and whispered, as though making a confession. His hot breath tickled Nigel's ear, but the words froze his thoughts like ice water.
“Then? What is it you want to do with me?”
Nigel clenched the wrist over his eyes hard enough to break it.
“Are you going to lock me up here forever?”
“No.”
After drawing one deep breath, Ethan answered like a sigh.
“By tomorrow, you'll be a dead man. Our goal is for you to be remembered as the tragic Crown Prince who was murdered during the Mardinia festival.”
“...'Our'? Do you mean that faction you tried to tell me about, including Karim Lake?”
Ethan Lake twisted his lips as if to say he wouldn't answer that question. It was a sneer that said that part wasn't what mattered in this conversation.
“It's a reckless plan.”
“No one was ever certain this revenge would succeed in the first place. In fact, we'd been on the verge of giving up.”
Giving up? Nigel's eyebrows rose. To die without knowing exactly how, or since when, these people had been plotting his death would leave him bitter even in death.
“That is, if you hadn't suddenly vanished for three whole days, Your Highness.”
“...And what does that have to do with it?”
At Nigel's question, Ethan fell silent for a moment, then lowered the hand that had been stroking the nape of his neck and smoothed out a crease in the fabric over Nigel's chest. It was a dreadfully calm touch, as though not a single wrinkle could be permitted on Nigel's uniform.
“How many of our people do you think are inside Kaiserion Academy right now?”
Tsk. Nigel clicked his tongue once, then said,
“I'll have to call the captain of the guard to account.”
“Do you mean Brace Gordo?”
When the guard captain's name came from Ethan's mouth, Nigel muttered surely not? inwardly, and a furrow dug into his brow. But that couldn't be. It was rare for any institution as important as the Imperial Castle, let alone Kaiserion Academy, to employ someone of non-imperial origin. Besides, the guard captain's looks and build were thoroughly those of an imperial, so suspecting him seemed warranted.
“Don't worry. He's a perfect imperial. A soldier who loves Kaiserion. If he has one flaw...”
Ethan said it with the corner of his mouth tilted up, as if cracking an amusing joke.
“...it's that he loves gold just a little more than the Empire.”
“...”
Nigel let out a hollow, bitter laugh. To think the guard captain responsible for the Empire's security had sold out the Crown Prince, blinded by mere money. But Ethan's expression said that wasn't all.
“The guard captain isn't the whole of it, Your Highness. Our hands have already reached into every corner of Kaiserion.”
“And why are you telling me this now?”
“And yet, from the day Lord Nigel suddenly disappeared to the moment he returned, not a single one of us could figure out what on earth had happened.”
“...”
That made sense. The only ones in the academy who knew were Rowen and Veil. No, counting Principal Silvanus, three in all. There were three people who knew that Nigel occasionally turned into a frog.
“What exactly happened wasn't important. What mattered more was that no one inside Kaiserion could trace Lord Nigel's whereabouts.”
So that's when they started moving in earnest. Nigel tilted his head slightly at the chain of events that was only now connecting.
“So, was today's commotion in the training hall the result of that impatience? You meant to kill me by merely dropping a light fixture? Rather crude. Ethan. No... Tashar.”
At the real name spoken low, Ethan's shoulders visibly stiffened.
Nigel grabbed his chin and forced their eyes to meet.
It was an overbearing posture, one that made the hierarchy built from power, the kind that never would have existed in an equal relationship between students at the academy, feel dreadfully real.
“...”
“...”
Held by the chin, the eyes that looked up at Nigel wavered strangely. More than the bewilderment of having his identity exposed, what filled them was a peculiar exhilaration at the fact that his liege had called him by his true name.
“If you're Tashar, then you're Sihar royalty. I heard they all died in the civil war... How did you survive?”
Nigel said it in a low voice.
Ethan slowly reached out and wrapped his hand around the slender wrist that gripped his chin. Strength gathered in each white-knuckled joint. Then he changed the subject. Ethan never spoke easily about himself.
“It was crude. If I'd wanted to kill you, there were plenty of surer means. No, perhaps I should say it was far easier than I'd thought. You put up walls and treat others coldly, but once someone crosses that fence even once, you become generous.”
Nigel's expression sharpened. Generous, of all things, was the word he thought least suited him.
“Plunging a knife into the back of someone like Lord Nigel was nothing compared to what I did to survive the civil war. But...”
Ethan's dark eyes wavered, engulfed in a dreadful heat.
“My heart changed.”
He rubbed his cheek against Nigel's palm and whispered, like an apostle prostrate at the feet of the god he worshipped.
“The moment I thought you might really die, my revenge and all the rest of it stopped mattering at all.”
Ethan knelt at Nigel's feet, yet his manner was anything but servile.
“I've decided to set aside my revenge to save you, Your Highness.”
Nigel's eyes twisted. Not one part of what Ethan said made any sense.
Stretching to be charitable, he could understand wanting revenge against the Empire after Sihar's fall. Even if it was a kingdom that, as a newborn nation with no settled order, had festered and collapsed from the very start, it was true that the Empire had reaped great profit after subjugating it by force.
But to enroll in Kaiserion Academy for the sake of revenge would have required enormous manpower and capital. There must have been a cause or conviction to match it, and yet this brat, the heir to a nation, was saying so casually that it had simply “stopped mattering”?
Nigel had lived his whole life proving he was a man worthy of inheriting the Empire. Wasn't this academy festival, too, a product of that very effort? To a man like Nigel, Ethan's words were utterly impossible to accept.
“...Why?”
“Sihar had been locked in endless civil war for centuries anyway. It would be better off absorbed into the Empire and finding peace.”
“No, that's not what I mean.”
“Then?”
“I'm asking why you chose me.”
I'm asking why you gave up your revenge. At Nigel's question, Ethan, instead of answering, raised his head and stared straight at him. Under Ethan's gaze, which clung to him relentlessly without a word of reply, Nigel felt a heat that seemed it might scorch his very skin.
“...Could you even call this a choice?”
With a hollow smile, Ethan tightened his grip on Nigel's wrist still further.
“In the end, this was the only option left in my hands.”
It was force enough to turn the skin white, yet strangely, more vivid than any pain was the trembling that passed through his fingertips.
“Nigel Kaiserion, you made me this way.”
A voice came, scraping out from the back of his throat. Nigel looked at Ethan's face as he let out a sigh, as if finally unburdened.
“I did?”
Nigel's low question rang coldly along the walls of the empty bell tower. Instead of answering, Ethan lifted his head and stared straight at him.
In that look in Nigel's eyes, Ethan seemed to read something else. At the end of a silence that felt chewed and bitten through, Ethan's lips parted, quivering.
