“Th-that is, if you would be so good as to visit again another time...”
“Are you giving me an order?”
Oh, this was bad. Ignis’s interest had shifted to the attendant, who had gone white as a sheet.
Those black pupils narrowed, then dilated, sliding slowly over the man’s features. The moment the survey was finished, they snapped back to normal.
Only now did he seem to register the third person in the room as a living creature rather than a piece of furniture. The corner of the boy’s mouth hitched up into a grin.
“Now that I look at you, I’ve seen that face before. You stepped up that time too, didn’t you? When the puppy collapsed.”
What? Out of Ignis’s mouth came a story I knew nothing about.
I stared blankly at my attendant. A young man who wore a ribbon tie well, standing there with his legs trembling, somehow managing not to sink to the floor.
“Right when things were getting fun, you threw yourself in front of me out of nowhere and dropped to your knees first thing. What was it you said? ‘At this rate His Highness may die. Please let me take him to his room so he can be treated.’ Something like that?”
“...”
“That’s it. And you said that if the game was short a player, you’d take his place. It’s coming back to me now. That part really impressed me.”
Whatever it was he found so entertaining, Ignis never stopped smiling the whole time.
His manner was light, unserious, like someone dusting off a trivial little memory that had been dozing in a corner of his mind. Yet every single word out of him landed like a disaster.
Even hearing it secondhand, I could piece together how desperate that moment must have been for my attendant. And despite saying he was impressed, Ignis didn’t look remotely moved.
Probably because he’d watched more than his share of people beg and plead at his feet over the years.
“You’d sit in the chair in the puppy’s place? Pretty funny. Should I call it remarkable confidence, thinking you could pass as a decent substitute?”
“...”
“Or should I just call it stupidity?”
At the sound of that small laugh, the back half of the memory I’d lost finally surfaced, faint and hazy.
Ignis, laughing like an innocent child as he watched me ham it up after drawing the pine caterpillar card. In that instant I’d felt the familiar swimming lurch in my head, and by the time I came to, I was looking up at a blue sky.
Who had been the one to catch me in a hurry that day, when the fever boiled over and I toppled backward? Why was it that I’d collapsed in the garden and still woken up safe in my own bed? And the person who’d had to clean up the mess in my place...
I looked at the two of them, squared off in a configuration that was all too familiar.
“And back then you forgot your place badly enough to make me an offer. What was it? That you’d take any punishment at all, so long as I let him go?”
Red warning sirens blared through my skull. Ignis’s index finger rose slowly and pointed at my attendant.
“I’ve decided. Your penalty is going to be...”
“Hyungnim...!”
The frantic cry burst out of me before I’d even finished steeling myself to salvage this. I grabbed Ignis’s hand and clung to it.
Those yellow eyes turned toward me very, very slowly, and my reflection appeared in their glistening surface. My own face, the corners of my mouth hauled up by force into something that barely passed for a smile.
“You came here for some other reason, didn’t you?”
I squeezed tight.
I put strength into my grip so his attention couldn’t wander off anywhere else. And I didn’t stop talking, so his focus couldn’t scatter either.
“After we parted, I thought I’d never get to see you again, not ever. So I’m really, really happy that I get to look at your face and talk to you like this!”
Please. Please take the bait. I’ll be your playmate, so get off that man’s back!
My heart was slamming away. The longer the silence stretched, the more my insides burned.
Ignis gazed quietly at the hand I’d seized. His left hand, long bones still filling out, gripped desperately by two hands far smaller than it.
He took in the sight for quite a long while, his expression never changing.
“Well, it nearly did come to that.”
Ignis answered as if it were nothing, neither shaking off the hand I’d caught nor closing his own around mine.
“I was going to bring that up anyway. The day I met you, I told my mother about you, and she hated it. A lot.”
The subject had moved on. I ignored the relief of having put out the immediate fire and kept my guard up, because the direction this conversation was heading wasn’t exactly promising either.
“When you say your mother, Ignis hyungnim, you mean Consort Lavina, right? Consort Lavina doesn’t like me?”
“Mm-hm. It’s past dislike. She was thoroughly repulsed.”
The words lodged in my chest like a thorn.
On the outside I put on a crestfallen face, but inside I felt rather hard done by. What exactly have I done to deserve that much hate from someone whose face I’ve never even seen?
Well, it wasn’t as if I couldn’t guess at her reasons. Nobody had to spell out why one of the Emperor’s consorts would keep a wary eye on a child born to another woman of the harem.
All three of us in that room had surely arrived at the same thought, and none of us bothered to say it out loud.
“My mother wants me to be the next emperor, see.”
“Hhk—!”
Scratch that. Ignis had gone and said it out loud after all.
Holy sh...
From outside my field of vision, where he’d only just managed to escape notice, I heard my attendant suck in a horrified breath and hold it. I worked hard at not letting my eyes drift that way. I didn’t hear that. I didn’t hear a single thing.
That the First Prince and the Second Prince were locked in a fierce contest over the next succession, and that one of the two would become the next emperor, were things everyone quietly treated as common knowledge.
But the Emperor hadn’t so much as named a crown prince yet, and in that climate, presuming to read His Majesty’s intentions for yourself was dangerous business.
One wrong step and every person in this room could be punished for lèse-majesté over a remark like that.
Whether Ignis didn’t know that, or knew perfectly well and simply didn’t care. With a roomful of appalled people in front of him, he carried right on without hesitating.
“Which is probably why she hates anything that might get in my way. No matter who it is, if there’s even the faintest chance they could become a rival, she thinks they ought to be pulled up before they ever sprout.”
“...”
“Even someone lying helpless in bed like this. She’d want him crushed without mercy. That’s the only way she can rest easy.”
[They treasure their own safety above all else, so they have no hesitation about destroying anyone else’s. They can’t be satisfied until even the powerless, feeble third in line for the throne has been squashed like an ant.]
For a moment, Ignis’s words and the line Michel spoke in the original overlapped in my ears.
“What does my puppy think?”
Having finished his explanation, Ignis looked me straight in the eye and lobbed the question at me out of nowhere, with a gorgeous smile.
“Sorry?”
“About getting rid of a rival in advance, before he gets in your way.”
The hand he’d been holding, he moved slowly until his fingers closed around my wrist.
My wrist was pitifully thin after days of not getting any proper nourishment, and it disappeared entirely inside that one hand. Snug and complete, without a hair’s breadth of room to squirm.
“Snapping the stem before the shoot can even grow, so that it never gets to bloom at all.”
He was only cupping it in his hand, and still it made my skin crawl.
“So it never dreams of growing again. Beyond recovery.”
If he put even a little more strength into it, the wrist in his grip would snap on the spot. The pressure was so vividly clear that I could picture exactly where the bone would give.
“What’s a rival?”
I swallowed dryly to hold down the churning in my chest, and asked.
It wasn’t a question I actually wanted answered. Just another little trick to wriggle out of the situation, same as always. Because if I kept my mouth shut, things looked like they’d turn dangerous.
But Ignis fielded it without blinking.
“It means two people fighting over the same thing they want. As long as they’ve both got breath in them, they fight tooth and nail until one of them is dead.”
Damn it, that got me nowhere!
Sadly, instead of the harvest I’d been hoping for, all I’d gained was a crystal-clear picture of what a rival meant to him.
It seemed that fudging my way through wasn’t going to cut it any longer. Not while those overbearing eyes stayed fixed wide open on me. Running was flat-out impossible.
Ignis was weighing whether to erase my future for the sake of his own. Was this the kind of thing the Michel of the original had recalled with that self-mocking tone?
So this is how it ends up after all.
I’d finally run into the threat I’d spent so long dreading, and strangely enough, now that it was right in front of me, it wasn’t as terrifying as I’d expected.
It wasn’t that I’d lost my fear or my will to fight. If anything, the opposite. My head was spinning fast, hunting for a way out of this.
What to do to keep breathing in a situation like this, which choice carried the least risk. All those simulations I’d run in my head, over and over, hadn’t been wasted after all.
I’d never wanted much from the start. The throne, court intrigue, all those terrifying, barbaric things held no interest for me whatsoever. The desire to win a competition didn’t exist in me, not by a speck.
My goal had always been the same and only ever one thing: survival. And so I could do this.
“I...”
A damp warmth gathered at the rims of my dry eyes. Easing the emotion open like a tap, I let tears well up until they trembled on the very edge of spilling.
No sobbing. Lay it on too thick and he’ll see through me. Sad enough to land, not so much that it gets in the way of saying my piece.
My head gave the order, and my lips quivered, the tip of my nose stinging and faintly flushing all on its own. Tensing right down into my throat for the sake of the crying act, my breathing shifted just slightly.
Now, if I tip my chin up just the tiniest bit so the tears don’t fall...
There. Now!
“I don’t want to fight with you, hyungnim...”
