And in the present, eight-year-old Michel sank into thought, looking back on a future that hadn’t happened yet.
And not long after that, Michel gets the heroine out of the palace, gets caught by his brothers, and ends up dead.
The way the original played out was crueler than you’d expect. Even with Michel’s help, Iris failed to get away in the end and was thrown into a cell.
“Michel... where is Michel? He promised me he’d draw everyone’s eyes away and follow right after, but I waited and waited and he never came back!”
“So you dare speak the name of the criminal who helped you flee, and in front of me, no less.”
“Please, I won’t even ask to see him, just let me find out whether he’s all right. Please?”
First Prince Kailan looked down with pitiless eyes at Iris, clutching the bars and pleading. Caged, the princess was an even more wretched, sorrier sight than she had been on the day they brought her in as a hostage.
In a voice lower than usual, he informed her of the outcome.
“I can’t imagine what you were hoping for when you went through with something this foolish, but the result is truly regrettable.”
“...What do you mean by that?”
“My younger brother has drawn his last breath. Less than a day after word came that you had left the palace.”
Michel’s death wasn’t even given a proper description. A few lines of narration from the man most likely to be his killer, and that was all of it.
As though he were a bit player who had never been assigned a role beyond that point in the first place.
“...Why Michel?”
“You’re surely prepared for a heavy sentence, given that a hostage attempted to leave the empire without permission. Your next meal won’t come for three days. You’d do well to conserve your strength until then.”
“W-wait! Tell me more than that. Tell me what happened to Michel... wait, don’t you walk away, explain it to me properly!”
Thud, thud!
Iris slammed her head against the bars until her forehead bled. But Kailan, heartless to the last, left without once looking back at her.
Left alone, Iris lost the strength in her legs and sank to the floor. And a little while later she forced herself into denial.
“No. There’s no way Michel is dead. There’s no way he died like that, for nothing.”
She muttered on as if her mind had drifted loose, and soon she was tearing at her hair, blaming herself in a daze. “Is it all my fault...?”
“Ugh, hhk...! Aaah!”
And in the cold underground cell, nothing was left but the echo of her desperate weeping.
...It was a story with absolutely no dreams and no hope in it.
And the biggest problem is that I’m inside that story with no dreams and no hope.
I’d been lost in thought, and I spat out the thermometer I had in my mouth.
The physician checked the mark the red line had climbed to, nodded, and gave me his findings.
“Your condition has improved a great deal since yesterday. I think it would be fine for you to take a light stroll inside the palace today.”
The moment she heard the physician’s verdict, Mother’s face brightened.
The physician, who had been explaining in a kindly tone, then put on a deliberately firm expression and addressed me.
“I hear that yesterday you ate nothing but fruit, and then brought it all back up?”
“Yes...”
“That’s better than having no appetite and eating nothing at all, but today you really ought to have a proper meal. Until your body has fully recovered, you must eat, even if you have to force it down.”
I swallowed down the burning in my stomach and nodded, because there was nothing else for it.
The suspicion and worry about poison were still there, but if I kept refusing food, starving to death would get me first.
The feeling of my belly sticking to my spine was unpleasant enough, but having sour fruit juice laced with stomach acid come surging back up my throat was something I’d very much like to pass on from here.
The Michel in the original lived to at least twenty, so eating a few meals shouldn’t cause me any trouble.
Finding food that was actually safe was something I could think about later.
Mother must have misread the way my face had clouded over a little, because she started coaxing me.
“I know it’ll be hard, but why don’t you try some clear soup with Mama today? It smelled lovely yesterday. One bite and I’m sure you’ll like it.”
I was on the verge of saying yes to that pleading look. That was when one of the maids who had been standing there like part of the scenery came forward with her hands folded politely and bowed.
“Forgive me, Your Highness Celine. A message from His Majesty. He says the morning’s business looks likely to finish early, and asks that you dine with him.”
“Now?”
Mother let a little of her bewilderment and displeasure show, but the maid didn’t yield; she bowed her head lower still as she answered.
“Yes. He said that if necessary, Prince Michel may join you as well.”
Mother’s face, bright only moments ago, filled with worry at once.
It seemed to grieve her both that the Emperor could be so indifferent when her only son was ill, and that her own position was such that, upset as she was, she couldn’t ignore a word he said.
I jumped in quickly, before Mother could so much as hint at refusing.
“I’m fine eating by myself. You two should have your meal, just the two of you.”
“But, baby...”
“My hands don’t shake anymore, so I can eat all by myself just fine. I’ll collect all my empty dishes to show off to you, Mother, so when you come back you have to praise me, all right?”
Mother looked at me quietly, with the eyes of someone watching a child who’d grown up far too early. Then, after a moment, she made herself smile and kissed my forehead.
“If you finish it all, that would be lovely and very good of you, but I’ll praise you even if you leave some. You’re always something I’m proud of.”
...Honestly, Mother spoils me rotten.
She kept turning to look back at me with reluctance dripping off her face, and I waved at her with all my might.
Once I’d finally gotten her out the door, I let myself flop down against the head of the bed, worn out.
All right, then... I had myself to myself for once. It seemed like a good time to put together a plan for what came next.
Realizing I’d been reincarnated, realizing which novel I was in...
The information came flooding in fast enough to leave me reeling in all sorts of ways, but this was no time to sit around in shock at my leisure.
If things stay as they are, Mother’s in danger.
Because my mother’s death had been creeping steadily closer without my ever knowing it.
The book said she died of poison while Michel was still young, which meant there might not be much time left at all.
It felt like owning a time bomb with no visible clock. To borrow a cheap phrase from my past life, I was absolutely bricking it.
If I wanted to avoid repeating the tragedy from the original, I needed more information. And the quickest clue I could get my hands on had to be the record of Michel’s own path through the novel, right?
Ideally I’d have the whole life mapped out in detail, from the moment he was born to the second before he died, but...
Unfortunately, that much was impossible. The novel revolved strictly around its protagonist, Iris.
From her vantage point as narrator, the only Michel on display was the one who’d already been through hell and back. There was no way a princess dragged in as a hostage from a neighboring country would know a thing about the childhood of the enemy empire’s third prince.
Michel did open up to Iris, the one person he ever opened up to, and he told her about his past now and then, but it never went beyond vague summary: this happened, and then that happened.
Which is to say there was a hard limit on how precisely Iris could ever grasp the years Michel had lived through.
And Michel wasn’t even the male lead to begin with.
More than anything, Iris was busy stacking up her own main storyline, so she never shone much of a light on the arc of Michel, who was nothing more than a helper in her escape.
...Hold on. That means knowing the original gets me absolutely zero advantage!
All at once a tangle of feelings crashed over me.
Isn’t the cliché of getting dropped into a novel that you seize the high ground with a superior stock of information and go from triumph to triumph?
Most of your standard regressors and transmigrators used their knowledge of the future to snap up a decent mine, or sink money into a promising stock and grow a nest egg into real capital.
And in possession or reincarnation cases, even if you landed the role of some nameless vagrant extra, you could still swoop in and take the protagonist’s prizes before they got there.
But take a look at my situation.
Michel: a prince raised from infancy inside the imperial palace and nowhere else.
Iris: a princess hauled into that same palace as a hostage.
Two people sealed inside the palace, neither of them able to set a single foot beyond it.
What is a prince who dies for lack of power and a princess who got hauled here as a hostage and locked up inside the palace supposed to be able to do, exactly?
The sum total of what the two of them did in the original was get their lives threatened and carry on a thrillingly dangerous romance.
Somehow the sense of being hard done by came rolling back in... But unless I planned to go read a different novel and angle for a second reincarnation, I’d better skip the self-pity.
Either way, the thing that mattered was what I could do.
Not being able to guard against every petty assassination attempt was one thing, but not knowing the date my mother died was pretty well fatal.
If I knew when it was coming, I could throw my body in the way, or knock the food out of her hands before she took a bite...
Sadly, that option was off the table, so I had to hunt for another one.
I’m eight now, so that leaves about ten years before the original story starts?
Ten years. Could I dodge every assassination attempt in that window and keep my mother safe?
Even if I got lucky and stopped the poisoning, there was no guarantee a second attempt wouldn’t follow. What I had to block wasn’t one single threat but threat after threat after threat.
On the physician’s advice, I was taking a slow walk along the palace corridor, and I stopped to open my palm and look at it.
Even allowing for how young I was, this body was far too slight, far too fragile. The proof was in the attendant trailing behind me, fretting himself to pieces over whether simply walking would make me stumble or drop where I stood.
How did I end up in such a sorry state?
And suddenly I understood exactly why the Michel of the original spent so much time pitying himself.
