“Your Highness! Are you awake?”
An urgent voice reached down and hauled me out of the unconsciousness I’d been sunk in. Haaah. I sucked in the breath that had been pinned down inside me, and it felt as though my lungs were swelling wide open.
The first thing I made out through the white blur of my vision was a familiar ceiling painting. A gilded masterpiece of angels overhead, and a child’s room decked out in splendor.
This place... was Prince Michel’s bedroom.
What? Why am I lying here?
Had I drunk the poisoned tea and gone straight into life number three? The scenery changing on me without warning felt like déjà vu.
While I was still reeling, a careful pair of hands lifted my body and propped me up against the headboard.
“Try some water first, slowly. Slowly...”
Only when the water touched my lips and I held it in my mouth did I realize how thirsty I’d been.
One swallow, then another. As the lukewarm water ran down my throat, the fog in my head gradually lifted. My attendant stroked my unsteady back with care as he spoke.
“It looked as though you were having a nightmare, so I had no choice but to wake you. Are you all right?”
...A nightmare? So what happened a moment ago was a dream?
From where to where, exactly?
My head was in such disarray that it wouldn’t turn over properly. When I just stared at him blankly, he kindly explained the situation for me.
“You’ve no idea how worried I was after you collapsed like that, Your Highness. Thankfully your fever has come down a great deal now.”
“...I collapsed?”
“Yes. Do you not remember?”
Seeing me sitting there thoroughly bewildered, the attendant gave me a look brimming with pity.
His eyes were practically saying, Our poor little prince! An inexplicable stab of guilt made me quietly look away.
“Your Highness... you met with Prince Ignis, and you collapsed all of a sudden in the middle of a game with him. I expect being out in the open air for so long was simply too much strain on your body.”
He’d wrapped it up as gently as he possibly could, but there was no way the cause was something as harmless as a cold breeze. I began rearranging my memories, fitting the scattered puzzle pieces back together.
Getting dragged into Ignis’s inhumane board game — that much had definitely, unquestionably been real.
The servants drawing cards in terror, taking their penalties with despair all over their faces. That hellish relay dragging doggedly on until my turn finally came around, and then...
That was as far as I got before I squeezed my eyes shut. Dredging up bad memories made my head hurt.
A downpour made of hairy larvae. Lumps the size of my fingers raining down with a patter and writhing where they fell — the afterimage was still vivid.
People screaming, the plip, plop of something dropping into a teacup, the phantom sensation of something crawling over my skin...
Gooseflesh prickled up all over me and I shuddered. I shook my head hard and flung the thought away.
Anyway, if nothing after that comes back to me at all, I suppose I have to assume I passed out right after the pine caterpillar penalty?
With that much stress piled on, it was only natural for my body to force a shutdown. This body had already nearly died of a serious illness not long ago as it was.
I let out a deep sigh. It seemed I’d done nothing but sleep ever since, yet I was still tired now that I was awake — the aftermath of the nightmare, probably.
To spin it in a vaguely positive direction, I’d gotten a lesson out of this whole business: if I wanted to survive any length of time in Michel’s body, I had to look after my mental health as carefully as the physical kind.
This time I seemed to have woken up safely in my own bed, but if I collapsed like that again next time...
It was right as my thoughts reached that point that a question suddenly struck me.
Hold on, now that I think about it, who carried me back to my bedroom? There’s no way that Ignis just let me go quietly because somebody keeled over.
“So you’re up?”
And in that instant, a voice that had no business being there came from somewhere very close by.
“I thought I’d wither away waiting. Puppy really is a little sleepyhead, isn’t he?”
I turned my head, and there was the red-haired boy.
Am I still not all the way awake? I rubbed my eyes slowly at the sheer impossibility of it, but the figure stayed fixed exactly where it was.
What is going on here? Why is Ignis in my bedroom?
“Hello. Lovely afternoon, isn’t it?”
He offered the greeting perfectly placidly, leaving me frozen stiff at the suddenness of it all.
He’d made himself so thoroughly at home in my room that I nearly forgot he was, in fact, a trespasser.
When did he...? No, more to the point, how on earth did he get in here!
There were rules to be observed when entering an imperial family member’s private quarters.
To prevent unauthorized entry, an appointment had to be arranged ahead of any visit, and before anyone came in, the guard stationed outside the door was required to verify the person and announce them aloud first. That was the procedure.
Ignis, however, had skipped that perfectly obvious process. And I mean skipped in the most literal sense.
He hadn’t shoved the guard aside and forced his way in, and he hadn’t made a grand racket smashing through a window either. He had simply appeared, spontaneously generated in the middle of a room where a second ago there’d been nothing at all.
Wondering if I’d seen wrong, I glanced at the attendant beside me, only to find his mouth hanging open in astonishment too.
Only then did I accept it: what I’d seen hadn’t been a simple hallucination.
“I said hello. You’re not going to say it back?”
Before I could even get my confusion in order, Ignis had drifted over to the bed and closed the distance between us in one go.
With his face right up against mine, I flinched and barely managed an answer.
“H-hello. Hyungnim...?”
“Ha ha, you look so stupid with that dazed face on.”
Whatever he found so funny about it, Ignis snickered and poked me in the cheek without the slightest hesitation.
Chicken-hearted as I was, even that tiny gesture made me jump like a startled bird, while the one actually pulling the strange stunt didn’t look the least bit bothered.
“Everyone jumps like that the first time they see it. It’s nothing, so don’t let it bother you. I just cut a few corners to get here fast.”
“Cut corners?”
“Mm-hm. It’s a long way to come on foot, and I wanted to see your face while you were awake.”
“I-I see...”
It was a spectacularly unhelpful explanation, but translated into plain terms, he meant he’d used magic. Nothing else could account for a situation this bizarre.
“By the way.”
Ignis, who had been staring at me without blinking, curved his eyes into a smile and tilted his head toward me.
“Didn’t our puppy miss me? You don’t look all that pleased to see me.”
It felt exactly like coming face to face with a scene out of a horror film.
My heart dropped clean through the floor at the emergency that had ambushed me out of nowhere. And in the same instant, the single most powerful ability I possessed kicked in. Namely, the survival instinct.
Before I could even think, my lips moved on their own and poured out an answer.
“No! That’s not it, I was just so startled. Until a moment ago I was with you inside a dream, hyungnim, and then I opened my eyes and you were still right there... I honestly thought I was still dreaming. Heh heh...”
That was reflex wit in its purest form. My brain, still vacant from having woken up barely any time ago, snapped straight into full alert. In front of Ignis there wasn’t a single moment to let my guard down.
“In a dream?”
“Yes!”
“How curious. If someone you’ve only met once turns up in your dreams, I must have made quite the impression.”
The playful tone could almost have passed for sarcasm. Watching the little performance in front of him with those golden eyes, thoroughly entertained, he asked,
“And? What then?”
“Sorry?”
“What was the me in your dream doing with you?”
What were we doing? Well, that was... The lingering traces of the dream rose up in my head and stoppered my mouth, leaving my lips to twitch uselessly.
“A game? A wager? Or if not that...”
“...”
“Having tea and sweets together, perhaps?”
How does he know what happened in my dream? Did he take a look inside my head or something?
Or don’t tell me, that wasn’t actually a dream at all...
Clamp.
I shut my lips, which had been on the verge of drifting open.
No, no. Calm down. Odds were Ignis had simply listed the first ordinary words anyone would associate with it. Reading something significant into them was nothing but my own imagination.
Even so, somehow my throat felt as though it had closed up, and my voice wouldn’t come out easily.
I have to handle this properly. Failing to handle it isn’t an option.
Whatever my frantic thoughts were saying, my body had gone stiff and would barely move. Cold sweat streamed down my back, like a helpless human standing before a natural disaster he couldn’t possibly stop.
“A-ahem!”
That was the moment. The moment a deliberate throat-clearing reached my ears.
I turned my head at once toward the noise that had broken the silence, and Ignis followed me, looking the same way. The one who had cut off that razor-thin conversation was none other than my attendant.
The instant he caught both my gaze and Ignis’s at once, the attendant’s shoulders gave a jolt. The tray in his hands rattled and shook; for someone who had drawn the attention on purpose, he was visibly terrified.
But then, as if he’d made up his mind about something, he straightened his back sharply and announced in his politest voice,
“Forgive me for interrupting, but Prince Michel must still rest and is in no condition to receive guests. S-so might I ask that you call upon him again another time, Prince Ignis?”
At that notice, delivered as neatly as if read off a manual, my mouth fell open before I knew it.
Of course, nothing he had just said was wrong. If anything, it was perfectly proper.
Ignis had used his power to let himself into the Third Prince’s quarters as he pleased. That alone left room for complaint, and on top of it, the Third Prince, the master of these quarters, was in poor health.
An attendant of this residence was entitled to request, on his master’s behalf, that the visitor return later through the proper channels. Naturally, that was not considered disrespect toward a member of the imperial family.
“What did you just say?”
The problem was that judging in accordance with etiquette didn’t mean everything was permissible. You needed to read the room a little before you acted, too.
And there were certain people with whom flexibility simply didn’t work.
