Ignis’s eyes were on the attendant, but his attention stayed fixed on the hand resting on top of my head.
“You’ve got yourself a fairly serviceable item there. If you can keep him in one piece, he’ll last another three years at least? Maybe even longer than that.”
Having muttered it half to himself, Ignis shifted his gaze back to me.
“Be careful you don’t lose him.”
The usual smile hung at the corner of his mouth, but his eyes had settled into something quiet and still.
“There are plenty of people who see something useful in another man’s hands and either take it for themselves or break it beyond any further use. Especially inside this palace.”
His words sounded like advice, and at the same time they felt like a warning. The arm pinning my body in place slid loose, and time, which had stopped dead, seemed to start flowing properly again.
“I should be going. I slipped out in secret, so it’s hard to stay long.”
Ignis took a casual step back and tossed the words out as if they cost him nothing.
“Let’s meet again sometime.”
The instant the conversation was tied off, his figure vanished like a lie. This time too, the whole business of passing through the door was skipped, and in the blink of an eye the space was simply empty.
He had turned up out of nowhere, and he disappeared just as abruptly. I stared blankly at the spot where someone had been standing only moments ago.
What on earth did he come here for?
There wasn’t a single thing I could be sure of. It felt like a small typhoon had swept through and moved on.
“Haaah...”
At first I’d decided I needed to build a friendly relationship with Ignis in order to survive. If I could make him an ally, surely I’d get to live a life that was at least a little safer, a little more peaceful.
But now, all of a sudden... it occurred to me that my choice might have been badly wrong. A premonition crept through my head that I might, in fact, be being dragged somewhere far more dangerous.
The strength went out of me all at once, and I tipped slowly backward and flopped down onto the bed.
“Y-Your Highness! Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I’m fine.”
I flapped a hand loosely at the attendant hurrying over, signalling that I was still alive.
His hand touched my forehead, checking for fever. What I felt was the ordinary, mild, perfectly standard body heat of a normal human being.
“If only I’d handled it a little better. I’m so sorry, Your Highness...”
The attendant pulled a guilt-stricken, near-tearful face, as though he were the one who had made me sicker. There was really no need for him to apologise. Looking at that honest, artless face, Ignis’s words came back to me all over again.
Loyalty that doesn’t waver in any situation, huh...
A bitter taste spread through my mouth. I gazed at the attendant in silence for a moment, then answered.
“That’s my line, not yours.”
“Pardon?”
“The business in the rose garden, and this just now too... none of it would have happened if I’d stayed put.”
The attendant blinked at me, dazed.
It was the first time I’d set the act aside and told someone honestly what was going on inside me.
Was it because I was a little worn out? Or because, for the first time, there was someone I thought I might be able to trust? Maybe it was both.
Only now that the dangerous part was over did I belatedly, carefully ask him the thing I’d never managed to ask.
“...Say. Why did you help me?”
I had my own reasons for doing what I did, of course.
Straying off the fixed walking route and running into Ignis, playing to his moods and acting harmless — all of it was calculated, all of it aimed at surviving the court intrigues to come.
The problem was simply that to anyone else watching, it looked utterly reckless and abnormal.
I looked at the attendant. The one person who had never left my side for a moment, before I got my memories back or after.
Which made him the one person who must have felt the strangeness most sharply of all.
However clever an eight-year-old Michel might be compared to other children his age, there was no way he could pass for an adult mind.
From the fever onward, I had clearly changed. Anyone who watched even a little closely would have noticed that my speech and my behaviour were off-kilter somehow. And yet he had never once put that doubt into words.
As though it had never crossed his mind to treat the change as a problem in the first place.
Hit with the rather out-of-nowhere question of why he had helped me, the attendant pulled an awkward face and picked over his words.
“Forgive me, but... I don’t think I understand Your Highness’s question.”
“Exactly what I said. You didn’t actually have to step in and help, did you? None of the other attendants there did. You could easily have pretended not to notice.”
“Good heavens, pretend not to notice? How could I possibly do such a thing!”
The attendant’s reaction was almost reflexive — violent enough that his whole body pitched forward first.
Seeing me shut my mouth in surprise, he seemed to realise only then that he’d raised his voice. He froze with his eyes wide, hastily covered it with a cough, and straightened himself up.
“Keeping Your Highness safe is simply what we are here to do. In that situation, it would have been stranger not to step in.”
Still, the feeling from a moment ago clearly hadn’t fully died down; a faint tremor lingered in his voice. He hesitated, then added a beat late:
“I only say this because His Highness the Second Prince isn’t present, but those attendants of his need to be retrained. When something like that happens, the very least they should do is think about fixing it. Not one of them spared a thought for their master — just read the room and kept their mouths shut. With an attitude like that, how on earth do they imagine they’re serving anyone above them...”
The attendant’s words came tumbling out in a rush, as if every grievance he’d been packing down all this time were spilling over at once.
I was a little taken aback, so I just watched him quietly — and partway through he stopped, apparently deciding for himself that he’d gone too far, and shut his mouth.
“Forgive me. I got far too worked up.”
He bowed his head in apology, then made a show of clearing his throat — ahem! — and slipped back into his usual gentle manner.
“I don’t know what led Your Highness to think that way, but there’s no need to dwell on it. It was an accident, nothing more — what could anyone have done?”
“...”
“You weren’t hurt, and it was all settled without any real trouble. That’s enough. So please, I’d rather you didn’t think of it like that.”
He really was upright and good-natured. In more ways than one, he was the very picture of an attendant who does everything by the book.
I’d done something openly suspicious, something I never normally did, and he didn’t even press me for a reason — he just took my side, no conditions attached.
Honestly? It was convenient. For someone who’d possessed this body, you couldn’t ask for better. It meant I could keep pulling stunts like this and have them brushed off as if nothing had happened.
Someone else would clean up the aftermath anyway, and each time I could tell myself I’d had my reasons and leave it at that. Awfully convenient, wasn’t it? Toss out that scrap of a conscience and just pocket the profit.
Someone who knew nothing gets sacrificed because of me, and so what — as long as I survive, it’s fine, what I did wasn’t wrong, no need to look back on it, and on and on like that...
Is it really all right to live this way?
“That’s not true.”
“Pardon?”
The words came out ahead of the thought.
My hand tightened on the blanket, and the crumpled cloth rustled inside my palm.
“It wasn’t something you just had to do. You were scared, and you still stepped in for me.”
I’d tried hard to rationalise it, but in the end I couldn’t look away from it — the fact that what I’d done was utterly selfish.
I squeezed my eyes shut and drew out the shard of guilt I’d been shoving off into a corner of my chest. The more I turned away from it, the sharper it got.
“The truth is, when you grabbed me and said we should go back to my room, I felt your hand shaking. I knew right then that you were frightened.”
I had known. I’d known exactly how uneasy he was in that moment, and how dangerous it was to linger there any longer. And still I didn’t stop.
At the time I’d thrown myself in under the banner of cleaning up the mess, but when you got down to it, I was the cause of the mess in the first place. If I hadn’t followed Ignis’s voice and had just taken my walk like a good boy, none of it would ever have happened.
And for all my bold charging in, I didn’t handle the aftermath at all — I fainted and turned into dead weight. All that was left in the end was the danger somebody else had shouldered in my place.
I thrashed and scrambled so desperately to protect my own life, and never once stopped to weigh anyone else’s. Apart from me and Mother, whatever happened to anyone was fine by me.
Just like... the people trying to kill me.
“But I knew, and I ignored it anyway, and ran off wherever I wanted.”
“...”
“Because it felt like I didn’t have to listen to you. I thought I wouldn’t get in trouble for causing a mess, and that what I’d decided mattered more.”
That might not have been judgment at all. It might simply have been arrogance.
It was my future to answer for, so I’d only risk as much as I could carry. That far and no further — that was the extent of my thinking.
But the weight on my shoulders and the weight on his had never been the same size to begin with.
The laws on regicide covered the imperial family, so at the very least nobody could kill me outright while there were eyes watching.
The attendant came from a noble house too, of course, so they wouldn’t kill him outright either — but set beside mine, a prince’s, his life was treated as far lighter.
He sat in exactly the right position: if someone wanted to achieve something, they could pin any crime they liked on him and sweep him away.
Like a piece on a board game — used for whatever he was good for, and the moment that use ran out, replaceable at a moment’s notice. That was what his life was worth.
And knowing that, I’d given no thought to him at all and acted entirely on my own. It never even crossed my mind to explain my sudden behaviour to him. I hadn’t cared.
Because I’d decided, all on my own, that this man wasn’t going to be at my side for long.
I’d written him off as someone who’d just pass through.
Because...
Ten years from now, the attendant at Michel’s side isn’t this man.
