No words had to be exchanged for the meaning to come across. It was a warning: don’t get any bright ideas about winning here, just lose.
Maria swallowed a sigh.
Obviously I know that. You’d have to be out of your mind to try and beat a prince.
Maria was, by rights, a lady’s maid in the service of Consort Lavina, Prince Ignis’s mother.
The other attendants gathered here belonged to the same household, and they’d all been summoned out to the garden for the frivolous reason that the prince needed someone to play his game against.
How exactly did we, who serve Her Highness the Consort, end up dragged onto a little prince’s game board... She felt a flicker of doubt, but this was the imperial palace. However unreasonable the demand, you did as the person you served told you.
Maria thought back to the warning she’d received from the prince’s personal attendant before coming out to the garden.
Whatever you do. Never, ever do anything that sours His Highness Ignis’s mood.
The fragmentary picture she had of this prince was of a boy more innocent and more mischievous than others his age.
Lately he’d become obsessed with board games and called attendants out every single day. The trouble, according to rumor, was that if their reactions fell even slightly short of his liking, he’d sink his teeth in and keep tormenting them until he got bored of it.
And sure enough, bring up games in front of the prince’s own attendants and you could watch them turn pale, hands shaking.
Just how badly do they get put through it to react like that?
Her own ten-year-old nephew would nag her endlessly for a rematch the second it looked like he wasn’t going to win. Projecting that image onto this prince, Maria could already feel the exhaustion rolling in.
A nephew she could at least ignore. This was a prince. One misstep and Consort Lavina might have her skin for upsetting her son, and that thought was terrifying.
So in the end, Maria gave up the card that would have locked in her victory, chose a different one from her hand, and set it quietly down on the table.
“Your card luck’s just not with you, is it? Looked like you only needed a little more to win.”
Looking at the card Maria had played, her colleagues made a show of disappointed noises. But she knew perfectly well that inside, they were quietly relieved. The whole game was rigged, after all.
Ignis stared at Maria’s piece, now moved exactly two spaces, then drew his card when his turn came back around.
Knowing nothing of any of it, the prince read the words printed on the card and spread it out on the table with a carefree look.
“Is that so? My card luck is strangely good.”
Clack. Ignis’s red piece vaulted over Maria’s and came to rest on the finish.
Having ended the game, Ignis shrugged as though it were nothing much and leaned back against his chair.
The attendants who, right up until then, had been cheering Maria on for form’s sake flipped their attitude the instant the prince won, quick as turning over a hand.
“Wow, that was magnificent, Your Highness! And here I thought Maria had it this time!”
“A clean comeback victory. Truly, no one can stand against Prince Ignis.”
Every one of them rejoiced as if it were their own triumph, clapping in perfect unison. It was like a play running along a script.
“Well, I suppose that’s only the natural outcome.”
Victory in hand, Ignis picked at the sweets on his plate with an easy, untroubled face.
Watching him, everyone at the table arrived at the same thought at the same moment. Huh? He’s easier to humor than we expected.
Reckoning that if they played this well they could wrap the whole thing up early, the attendants exchanged glances and silently cheered. Losing had been the right answer after all.
One of the attendants at the prince’s right read the moment, filled his cup to the brim, and struck up conversation.
“I’ve never once met anyone in my circles who plays games as well as Your Highness.”
“Really? You all think I’m good at this?”
“Yes. I daresay you could gather the finest players in the empire and not one of them would be a match for Your Highness.”
“Wow, that good? I guess I really am a genius at everything.”
He was a child, so his way of thinking seemed simple enough.
The mistress they served, Consort Lavina, was a difficult, capricious woman, and vain on top of it.
Satisfying a woman like that required a talent for excessive flattery and lavish praise, and everyone gathered here had that skill as a matter of basic competence.
Fortunately, her son seemed to enjoy the same brand of compliment, so the mood wasn’t turning out badly at all.
If he’s this easy to manage, why on earth did his personal attendants wear that look, like the job was killing them?
“Why not ride the momentum and play one more round, Your Highness?”
“Hmm, I wonder?”
He even showed a hint of hesitation when they urged another round. The attendants found it a little odd, so unlike the rumors, but they worked all the harder to keep the prince in a good mood.
“It would be such a shame to stop already when we’re having this much fun.”
“Quite right. And if you ask me, Your Highness could do anything today and succeed at it. Your luck really is remarkable.”
Ignis watched them lay the flattery on without restraint, then answered with perfect innocence.
“But this game has nothing to do with luck.”
“Pardon? Ah, of course. Your Highness won on pure skill, naturally.”
A board game was, without question, something swayed entirely by luck. But if the prince said it wasn’t luck, then it wasn’t.
When they instantly amended their own words and built him up, insisting it was indisputably his skill, Ignis giggled as though hugely entertained.
“No, that isn’t what I’m talking about.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I suppose people really ought to quit the false modesty and just live the way they’re built. Your faces were funny, so I thought I’d watch for a bit, but I’m already bored of that too.”
It was unmistakably a face lit up with good humor, and yet something about it brushed cold against the back of every attendant’s mind.
Ignis reached out and flicked one of the pieces sitting on the board with his fingertip.
Clatter.
The sound of that weightless little scrap of carved wood tipping over onto its side rang out strangely loud.
“You’re all throwing the game on purpose. What fun is there in repeating a game whose result has already been decided?”
One sentence from the prince, and the noisy little gathering fell dead silent.
In that frozen pocket of time, the red-haired prince alone tilted his head to the side and asked, perfectly at ease,
“What? Did you think I was too much of a halfwit to notice?”
Not one of the people who had been fussing and flattering to keep the mood bright could get a word out. Only a single thought filled their heads: We’ve been found out. We’re finished.
“I’m disappointed. I borrowed you because I was sick of playing the same opponents over and over. Like this, you’re completely useless.”
On the surface Ignis’s complaint might have passed for a child’s sulking, but the feeling behind it was utterly dry.
If they had misjudged anything, it was this: Ignis was the sort of person who cared about the process, not the result.
“Did you really think I called you here because I wanted to hear some fresh brand of flattery?”
Slipping each other secret signals, lying that they’d drawn the wrong card, heaping on nothing but hollow praise. Watching them was like sitting through a farce he could see straight through. That wasn’t what Ignis wanted.
He tapped at the tabletop with a bored look on his face, and the beat of it fell almost exactly in time with the second hand of a clock.
At that sound, like a timer counting down his patience, one attendant came back to himself faster than the rest, bowed his head low, and stammered out an apology.
“I-I’m terribly sorry... If we have dared to offend Your Highness, that is to say...”
“If an apology settled things, why would there be a law against disrespecting royalty? Still, it’d make a funny story, wouldn’t it? Flogged for deceiving a prince over a board game. Right?”
Deception. The very thing they’d done to avoid offending the prince had turned on them and was closing around their throats.
Ignis narrowed his eyes and examined the drained, bloodless faces of his attendants one by one. The black pupils set in all that vivid yellow widened by degrees, the way they would at the sight of prey.
Once he had taken in every single face, he broke into a bright smile, like a boy whose mood hadn’t been dented in the slightest.
“Ahaha!”
That clear peal of laughter, so wrong for the moment, lodged in their ears like a thorn.
Why is he laughing all of a sudden? Was there something funny just now? With no way of reading what the prince meant by it, the attendants could only break out in goosebumps.
Ignis laughed to himself for a good while, then spoke again in an airy tone, as though he’d never been serious for a second.
“I’m joking. As if I’d punish anyone over something like this. There’s no need to take it so seriously, just laugh it off.”
“...Ah, haha... So it was a joke.”
Everyone at the table pulled their lips up into awkward smiles, but the frozen air didn’t thaw all the way through.
To clear the atmosphere, Ignis gave a light clap of his hands and smiled.
“Well, it isn’t as if my mood wasn’t soured at all, but it’s your first offense, so I’ll give you one chance to make up for it. In return, no more of that from the next round on. Agreed?”
“Sorry? You mean...”
“What are you waiting for? Everyone set your pieces back on the starting square.”
Ignis picked up the piece he’d knocked over and added, in a magnanimous tone,
“A plain game seems a little flat, so this time I’ll help you concentrate.”
Scrrape. The base of the piece dragged deliberately across the board, grinding out a noise that set the teeth on edge.
He planted his red piece on the starting square, and between his smiling lips a pair of sharp fangs showed.
“In return, from here on, if you don’t play in earnest, I’ll be angry.”
