My mind was in a frantic hurry, but this frail scrap of a child prince’s body was no help at all. If anything, it was actively holding me back.
If only I had some power of my own. Raw physical strength, or real authority — either one might have made my situation better.
And if I couldn’t change what I’d been born with, then at the very least I’d like a powerful ally instead...
That was as far as I got before my feet came to an abrupt stop.
Wait a second.
If I have no power... then I just need to make someone who does into my ally.
It felt like the fog in my head had cleared all at once.
Who on earth can handle every hard thing in this world with nothing but their own two hands? Without cooperation, humanity never would have developed at all — we’d have been hunted down by predators and gone extinct before we ever reached the Stone Age.
For a person, the thing that matters just about as much as money is connections: blood ties, hometown ties, school ties.
My body may be a child’s, but my mind is an adult’s. With the social finesse I’d built up over a whole working life, surely I could sweet-talk one or two of them around?
Of course, the pool of candidates I could realistically persuade was painfully small. If they’d been the sort of people who were easy to talk round in the first place, the Michel of the original would never have been facing poison at all.
It had to be someone with enough of a relationship to me that they wouldn’t simply ignore a child who spoke to them, and who at the same time looked likely to have real power...
The first person who came to mind was my father. If you had to pick the highest, strongest man in the empire, it was unquestionably the Emperor.
We’re not exactly close, but I’m still his blood. He’d at least pretend to listen, wouldn’t he?
After turning it over and over, though, I struck the Emperor off the list.
And not simply because I wasn’t close to him, or because persuading him seemed hopeless.
The Emperor looked at everyone, me included, with no feeling at all — but with my mother he was unfailingly tender. Even without any persuading from me, he was a man who would always take her side.
Which, paradoxically, meant that even he had failed to protect her in the original.
His attention went past affection and bordered on obsession, so it wasn’t as though he’d been negligent, or that he’d lacked the ability to stop his wife from being poisoned.
They must have struck in the one gap where the Emperor’s eyes were turned elsewhere.
Mother died before the Emperor could lift a hand to stop it, and after that Michel was left so utterly neglected that even the assassins lost interest in him.
They’d judged that every string the Third Prince had was cut, and that he was no longer capable of so much as threatening their positions.
If even the Emperor can’t protect Mother, then who the hell can?
The attendants who never left her side? Her escort knights? In the original, they all ended up being part of the reason she couldn’t be saved.
A person only gets one life. And I only got one chance to protect my mother. Going with a method already proven to fail meant a high chance of simply repeating the same mistake.
Wasn’t there some way to protect her that differed from the original? I needed a clever plan, something that would wrench the plot off in a safer direction.
And then a thought flashed through my mind.
If there’s no way to protect her perfectly no matter what I do, then why not win over the enemy who poses the threat instead?
The root of all evil, the ones who killed Mother and Michel in the original. My brothers, in this life of mine.
They had the advantage of being easy to approach, since we lived in the same palace, and we were blood relatives, so I could manufacture some excuse to strike up a conversation naturally enough.
Hold on, how did the Michel of the original treat his brothers again?
As I thought it over, the contents of the original surfaced in my head of their own accord.
“They tell me you miss every single official event the imperial family hosts, Your Highness?”
Iris dropped a sugar cube into her teacup as she asked it, lightly, and Michel answered just as lightly.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“But they’re official functions. Is it really all right for a prince to skip them?”
“Hardly anyone cares when I do. And staying at that sort of gathering for long is hard on me.”
“Ah... right, crowded places must be a strain on your body.”
“That’s not wrong either, but it’s less about that than...”
Michel sipped his tea, to which he’d added nothing at all, and smiled gently.
“Official or not, I’d rather decline to breathe the same air as them.”
“Oh.”
“I’d prefer not to see them if I can help it, and not to hear their voices either. If I ran into them even by accident, my blood pressure might shoot up and I’d drop dead meekly, exactly the way they want — and I’d hate that too.”
“Ha ha...”
Right. The Michel of the original hadn’t dealt with them at all, as a matter of principle. Which made perfect sense, given they’d murdered his mother.
And honestly, I didn’t want to deal with them either. It hadn’t happened yet, sure, but they were going to kill my mother and me — who’d want to get chummy with people like that?
As someone carrying the memories of a modern life, the mere fact that there were assassins in my vicinity was enough to scare me half to death.
Normally there’s no way in hell I’d take a gamble like this.
To an outsider looking in, it probably wasn’t far off a moth going out of its way to fly into the fire.
But I can’t think of any other decent option either.
Maybe it was from working my brain so hard, but by this point the self-justification started rolling along all on its own.
Yes, my brothers in the original had been brutal — but this was ten years before that, wasn’t it? Right now they were children, which meant there was a good chance their brains were still soft and pliable.
If I never made enemies of them in the first place, starting from the time we were this small — if I could blunt the very blade they’d one day hold...
My heart was thudding with something I couldn’t name as fear or anticipation.
First things first: I do the exact opposite of what Michel did.
I didn’t know the right answer for surviving, but I did know the wrong one. So the logic was, at minimum, avoid that.
The Michel of the original had drawn pointless suspicion for being clever, kept his brothers at a stiff distance, and carried a considerable amount of hostility on top of it. On the rare day he crossed paths with them by chance, he’d calmly deliver a few choice barbs, as I recalled.
Now that I think about it, the kid had guts.
If I’d been the one who wanted Michel gone, I’d probably have thought, he was already an eyesore, and what luck, he’s a rude little brat too, and slit his throat that much faster without a shred of guilt.
Anyway... by this point, the direction I had to go in was already decided.
A way to stay off their bad side as much as humanly possible, and to steer things toward a friendly enough footing that threatening my life would never so much as occur to them.
The exact reverse of the original Michel: I’d play the dim, affectionate, well-meaning little brother. If the process was the exact opposite, maybe the outcome could be the exact opposite too.
“Ahaha!”
And the instant I’d settled on it, a burst of noise came drifting in through the windows along the palace corridor.
At the far end of the sun-drenched garden, in the middle of a cluster of attendants gathered around a tea table, a boy with hair of a singularly vivid red was laughing.
The imperial palace’s rose garden was a place where you could enjoy beautifully kept landscaping and the faint drift of flower scent at the same time, which made it a favorite spot for the royal family’s walks and tea times.
Today, the tea table in the rose garden was claimed by six people in total: the red-haired prince and five attendants.
“It’s Maria’s turn now.”
“You’ve got this! Only five spaces left, so if you play it right you could make it in this turn.”
Along the edge of the snow-white table sat an assortment of sweets and drinks with ice floating in them, while the center was a jumble of a board game and scattered cards.
Those who had already been knocked out of the game, or who had no hope left of winning, started throwing their support behind Maria, who was out in front.
Feeling an invisible weight pressing down on her, Maria carefully drew a single card.
“...”
The game worked like this: each turn you drew one card, then chose a card from the deck in your hand to move your piece toward the finish.
Five spaces left to the finish. And as it happened, one of the cards in Maria’s hand was a ‘Cloud Pilot.’
Play the card she’d just drawn, advance seven spaces, and she’d cross the line in one stroke.
But Maria didn’t lay the card down. Instead, without thinking, she looked up at the Second Prince seated across from her.
The Second Prince, Ignis, bore a certain resemblance to the roses blooming in that garden.
His scarlet hair glittered in the sunlight like a burning flame, and the outer corners of his eyes swept upward in a bewitching curve.
Beneath softly curling lashes sat golden eyes with vertically slit pupils, which at a single glance put him a long way from being an ordinary child.
Ignis had been lazily propping his chin on one hand, and when his eyes met Maria’s, he gave her a stunning smile.
“What’s the holdup? You haven’t played your card. Do you need more time?”
“N-no. The card I drew was a tricky one, so I was weighing it up.”
She hadn’t expected to be met head-on by his gaze, and while Maria was flustering, the colleague sitting beside her discreetly patted her on the back.
Tap, tap.
At that signal, passed along without a word, Maria’s body went stiff on reflex.
Read the room and act accordingly.
The Korean trio hyeollyeon, jiyeon, hagyeon — ties of family, region, and alma mater — names the three networks commonly understood to decide how far a person gets in life.
