If this bought her any comfort for the last three years, Lee Hyeon figured Yuan’s regret might ease a little.
“I’ll leave the medicine with you and take my leave for today.”
He reached into his coat and drew the elixir out of his inventory, handed it to the servant who stepped up, and dipped his head in farewell.
Lady Dione watched his back the whole way out as he left with Cohen.
She’d heard he’d been through something terrible in that rift. When word of the trial reached her she’d meant to attend the court in this wretched body of hers, and that day she’d fallen badly ill instead.
After that she read the news in the papers and assumed the boy was scheming again. He was the child who ignored the counsel of the family that raised him and moved only for his own gain. Why would this be different?
Until she faced him again today, she’d believed he would never change as long as he lived.
“...Bring me the medicine.”
The servant hesitated, then carried the vial over. She closed her hand around it and sank into thought, turning the bottle over in her fingers, listening to the carriage in the garden pull away.
When the sound had gone entirely, she uncorked it.
“My lady.”
The servant and the maid called out, urgent, as if that might stop her. It did nothing against her will.
“If I die, divide the money in the safe among yourselves and leave this place.”
Every face in the room went white and froze, like people who’d just heard a verdict read. Then Lady Dione drank.
If trusting him was a sin, she’d accept it and blame nobody but herself. Her life was ending anyway. There wasn’t much to lose.
But if she lived. One chance in ten thousand, and she lived.
Then she’d carry the debt of today to the end of her days.
Madam said nothing the whole way back to the manor. He was a taciturn man to begin with, but his face was somewhere far off, and he watched nothing but the window.
They reached the estate and stepped down, and Cohen finally spoke.
“That medicine. Was it something to make her passing easier?”
He’d never heard of a medicine that cured cancer. If such a thing had been developed, Cohen read the empire’s affairs in the paper every morning and would hardly have missed it.
Which meant it might not be a cure at all but a narcotic painkiller. The kind you only got in the shadows might dull her suffering for a while.
Ask whether that counted as treatment, and in the sense of honoring what was left of her life, perhaps it did.
“No.”
Lee Hyeon denied it.
“What I gave her was a cure. Unmistakably.”
“Sorry?”
“In my experience nothing is harder to cure than the kind of illness that sits in the heart. Not disease. Not injury. The moment she started fighting hers, her will to live broke and her spirit went with it. That medicine does nothing more than treat that.”
“That’s.”
It amounted to a confession that the medicine was a hollow fake. He’d handed it over, and the one who had to fight the disease and win was Lady Dione. Sweet enough in the moment, and if her condition didn’t improve, the betrayal coming back at her would be past describing.
That was Cohen’s reading of it. Lee Hyeon buried what he’d done as if it were nothing, which was the only way the fact that a cure for cancer had been sitting in his hands would quietly stop mattering.
“Do you believe she’ll overcome it, Madam?”
“I don’t know.”
At that careful question Lee Hyeon stopped at the entrance and looked up at the sky. Whether she’d trust Yuan at this late hour and drink, or hold on to her distrust and vanish quietly in pain, was not his to decide.
“If she drinks it and recovers, I’ll trust her and ask her to teach me. And if she doesn’t drink it, I won’t hold it against her.”
It came down to the will of a woman who’d lived far longer than he had. If she couldn’t trust him, that was his failure for not earning enough of it. In that case he’d watch over what time she had left and do the things Yuan left undone in his place.
He started walking again. With her cooperation off the table, the problems inside that household needed another route.
The house was no place for Millian to grow up. The ones with privileges shirked their duties and neglected the boy as a matter of routine, and the ones buried under work were too pressed meeting quotas to spare him a thought.
It isn’t that he likes playing alone. He’s been left alone long enough that alone became the comfortable option.
Changing the boy’s outlook meant tearing the whole environment up and rebuilding it.
A long road.
He decided to ask Cohen about it, or Rofel and Romi, and made an effort to settle the tangle in his head. The work wouldn’t come together at all that day. He was human too, and thinking that hard had its cost.
So the next morning he went downstairs to find Cohen, and there he came face-to-face with a rare thing. A visitor, at this hour.
An upright bearing for an elderly woman, and an elegant outing dress. Hair swept neatly up under a floppy hat pressed down over it. She came into the house on Cohen’s arm.
Lee Hyeon’s mouth fell open.
Lady Dione.
The gauntness had given way to a robust frame, and there was healthy color moving under skin that had been paper-white.
One night. Lee Hyeon understood.
She’d drunk it.
She inclined her head elegantly toward the man standing there staring at her.
“Allow me to greet you again, Lady Winter. Rozella Dione.”
Then she raised it, with a smile that carried dignity and warmth in the same breath.
“Beginning today, I shall give you the most punishing instruction. For your own good.”
“Millian.”
Lee Hyeon had combed the manor since dawn, and now he came out to the garden looking. He was tracking the boy down to eat breakfast with him, and as usual, not a hair of him anywhere.
Fellow hunters with cousins or younger siblings said finding a kid hiding in a house was easier than eating cold porridge. Set aside the sheer size of this place and even a man who’d never had a younger sibling should have turned up one child at least once.
A full week. And four days now since Lady Dione arrived.
Since she came, every rule in the estate had been torn up and rewritten, exactly as he’d hoped. Maribelle had enjoyed her privileges as a noble’s daughter and given the servants their orders. A woman of higher standing moved in and reordered the place, and Maribelle went along with it helplessly.
She valued power to begin with, so submitting to power came naturally. Defiance would have meant betraying the one conviction she’d upheld all along.
“Hm. What a shambles. Lady Winter, I’ll be putting the tone and the order of this house right for a while. Would it be acceptable if the lessons came after?”
“That was exactly what I wanted to ask of you first.”
“Then on the name of the Dione family, I shall rebuild an order and a system worthy of a ducal estate.”
Which meant Lee Hyeon could hand the household to her and pour the time he freed up into Millian. Every time he finished work, he set out through the manor to find him.
The first attempt, Millian had been doing homework in his room. He went white the instant he saw Lee Hyeon and threw himself out the window. Lee Hyeon rushed over in alarm and found the boy had landed safe in a hedge and gone scrambling off.
No hesitation in the execution and not a hair’s error in the landing. From that, Lee Hyeon understood the boy kept escape routes ready at all times.
He hadn’t caught sight of him once since.
Combing the garden, he ran into the gardener whose face he’d been seeing a lot of lately. The man had been tending the beds in clothes stuck with soil and leaves, straw hat on his head, and the moment he saw Lee Hyeon he pulled it off and bowed.
“Good morning, Madam.”
“You’re hard at work so early.”
Still not used to being spoken to politely, the man laughed awkwardly.
“Looking for the young master again today, are you?”
“Have you seen him?”
“I have. He left for the academy even earlier than usual.”
Lee Hyeon sighed. It was around seven, and his plan to have breakfast and see the boy off had come to nothing again. To avoid him, Millian had gone a full hour early.
“Thank you for telling me. The sun’s harsh today, so please take it easy.”
“Thank you for always thinking of us.”
He gave a short bow, turned, and headed for the study. With Millian already gone there was no reason to eat in the dining hall. Work in the study and Cohen would bring him something easy to eat, which suited him better anyway.
Rofel and Romi were in ahead of him, sorting documents, and they broke into wide smiles when he came through the door.
“Welcome, Madam!”
“Good morning. Except it doesn’t look like a good one.”
He’d been coming in with his brow furrowed more often than not lately. He’d failed to catch the young master for breakfast again, by the look of it.
