Thanks to the endless assassination attempts, the people around Michel were swapped out constantly.
Wet nurse, head cook, physician, attendant. Nearly every servant whose face I knew now never appeared in the original ten years later. And the man standing in front of me was no exception.
I don’t know the details of what became of people the novel never described. But if I had to name the reasons they vanished partway, there were broadly two. Either they left of their own will, or they had no choice but to leave.
Most of them were the latter. Specifically, the ones punished for being implicated in an attempt on the Third Prince’s life.
Ever since I got my past life’s memories back, I’d deliberately kept my distance from the attendant who had served me faithfully for years. Because I thought he might someday slip poison into my food.
But in the end, he...
He hasn’t done a single thing. Enough that suspecting him starts to feel idiotic.
If anything, he’d worn himself out trying to keep me alive.
He’d met Ignis’s gaze head-on and carried me on his back at a run, with no idea what might be done to him. He’d guarded me. Protected me. While I’d suspected him and turned my face away.
“You can scold me, or hold it against me. It’s my fault it all blew up like that. I’m sorry for causing trouble.”
The guilt made it hard to lift my head. All that swagger about being on my second run at life, and this was the best I could manage? At this rate, how was I ever going to protect Mother?
Could someone like me really protect anyone at all?
“Your Highness.”
A low voice called to me just then.
I raised my eyes slowly, braced for some sign of displeasure — and instead found a pair of warm eyes looking back at me.
“There’s a thought I always have whenever I look at you, Your Highness.”
His palm swept slowly across my forehead. I couldn’t help widening my eyes at the unexpected gesture.
It wasn’t the easy touch of a mother handling the child she’d borne. Nor was it like Ignis’s touch, rough and incapable of measuring its own strength.
The attendant’s hand was terribly careful. Delicate, the way you’d handle something that would shatter under the slightest pressure, and yet never losing its tenderness.
“Such a small body, and you endure so very much with it. Is that why you’ve grown up so far ahead of your years?”
“...”
“Presumptuous of me to say such a thing to you, isn’t it? Reprimand me, if you wish.”
Even as he said it, there was a strange certainty in his face. Like a man who knew perfectly well that I wouldn’t actually get angry.
At the very least, he didn’t seem to be dressing up words he didn’t want to say, crushed under the weight of rank.
“You’ve spent most of your time in this place alone, Your Highness. Bearing painful treatments, swallowing bitter medicine without a word of complaint, quietly enduring things grown men would struggle with.”
His eyes looked like they were resting on something admirable, and somehow faintly bitter at the same time.
The hand that had been drawing the heat out of me for so long slowly lifted from my forehead.
“Serving a master this good and this well-behaved ought to set a man’s mind at ease. Strangely, it doesn’t. The more composed you were, Your Highness, the more it weighed on me.”
“...”
“There were times I honestly wished you’d act out the way ordinary children do. Turn up your nose at your food, throw a fit about not wanting to go home. That sort of thing.”
A gentle hand drew the blanket up and tucked it over my shoulders. A kind smile spread across the attendant’s mouth.
“And wouldn’t you know it, this time that wish of mine finally came true.”
The touch was different, but that warmth in his gaze felt cut from the same cloth as Mother’s. It was the face of a guardian with a solid core.
“What happened is my responsibility — as your attendant, and as an adult who failed to properly protect you. You’d been so well-behaved all this while that I let my guard down without realizing it.”
Pat, pat. A steady rhythm tapped against the blanket.
“Next time I’ll be careful. I’ll pay closer attention, I’ll try harder, and whatever happens, I will protect you. As much as all the coddling I failed to give you until now.”
“...”
“So if you feel even slightly unwell, Your Highness, please don’t endure it. Tell me. I’ll carry you somewhere safe, any time at all.”
His voice was firm, telling me to trust him and no one else, and it felt like something I could lean on. Even though these were the words of a powerless young man who’d be swept away by a single wave of the court’s power.
Honestly, up until now I’d thought my life here was nothing but bleak. I believed I’d been dropped into barren ground with nothing handed to me, left to survive alone without the slightest help.
But the world apparently isn’t always heartless. So that I wouldn’t have to survive all by myself, it turned out I still had some luck left when it came to people.
I felt a light of hope rise over an endless sea that had been utterly empty. And at the very same moment, a thought shoved its way in and left the back of my neck cold.
How did the Michel of the original lose this man?
The instrument most often used in an assassination is the target’s closest confidant. You can plant a spy, sure, but you can also simply buy off someone who already holds the position.
Sooner or later, an offer would come to this man too. And he’d be pressed to choose. Help kill the Third Prince, or be silenced.
I could guess exactly which one this kind young man would pick.
Be careful not to lose him. When something another person owns looks useful, plenty of people will take it, or break it badly enough that it can never be used again. Especially inside this palace.
The words Ignis had left behind came back to me out of nowhere.
Instead of closing my eyes and settling into the warmth, I lifted my hand and caught the one that was still patting me.
“...Ivan.”
For the first time since I’d regained my memories, I looked straight at him, at the fact of him, and said his name.
“Thank you. For everything, always.”
The attendant — Ivan — went wide-eyed. He looked startled, as though he’d heard something he never expected, and somehow moved by it too.
“You needn’t thank me, Your Highness. If there is ever anything you require, please tell me at once.”
Looking at this young man and his guileless reaction, I thought: I want to protect him.
And I hoped, as hard as I could, that I’d never have to watch him exit this story.
Deep inside the imperial palace, in a drawing room, a woman sat quietly drinking her tea.
Afternoon light seeped through the gap in the curtains and the fragrance of tea filled the air — a perfectly peaceful scene. And yet the servants standing in that room didn’t dare breathe too loudly, keeping their heads bowed in silence.
The woman tilted her cup and said nothing at all for a long while. She only drew the tea slowly into her mouth, every movement unhurried, and set the cup back down.
After a moment, a slender finger tapped lightly against the handle of the cup.
“The child is back on his feet again, is he?”
She said it the way one might remark on fine weather, as if it hardly mattered. There wasn’t a trace of anything so petty as surprise or anger in that gentle voice.
“Yes. He is.”
“What a stubborn little life. Always on the verge of snapping, and never quite snapping.”
She glanced once out the window. Her gaze went toward the quarters where the young prince lived.
“Celine. That lowborn woman must have worked very hard indeed. Don’t you think? They don’t say ‘even the lowliest creature guards its young ferociously’ for nothing.”
No voice answered her, but the woman went on in the same placid tone.
“I really should have killed him while he was still in that woman’s belly... His Majesty clung to her so absurdly closely that I never got the chance to deal with it in time. It galls me.”
The voice was soft, but there was an edge on every word. She started to lift the cup again, then stopped, as though something about it displeased her.
Her mouth was curved in a pleasant line. Her eyes weren’t smiling in the least.
“Killing him outright isn’t worth that much risk to me.”
She paused for a beat and lowered her gaze.
“And leaving him alive is irritating.”
A breeze came in from outside and the curtains stirred faintly.
The woman tipped her head, seemingly lost in thought for a moment, then added lightly, as if it were nothing at all,
“Well. Let’s watch him for now.”
She stared down into the cooled cup, then turned it right over and poured the tea out onto the floor.
“We may not have to make a move at all. With a little luck, he’ll do us the favor of dying on his own. One small child dropping dead without warning — that happens all the time.”
