Noah remained kneeling in the royal audience chamber, head bowed low before the king of Avianoia. He was now nearing the end of his account of a past that he had long buried.
“Leonhard,” the king began. “To atone for your father’s sins, you will serve under me until your death.”
Ashamed of what he was going to confess, Noah had asked to speak somewhere other than the sanctuary where Claudia slept. Now, he knelt before the king’s throne as Volkhard gazed down upon him.
To Noah’s surprise, Volkhard had ordered him to tell him everything, not just give him the details that concerned Claudia. And so, Noah had begun from the beginning.
“My uncle poured all the hatred he had for his brother into me.”
Noah’s uncle had been tormented by his older brother, Noah’s father, from the time they were children. Eventually, his uncle had murdered his tormentor and taken the throne of Lemilsia for himself.
He then enslaved Noah with the warning, “If you disobey me, I’ll kill your sister Anna. Do you understand?”
Thus, Noah had been allowed to live, but only as a slave for his uncle to take out his rage upon. In exchange for sparing his newborn sister, Noah had surrendered himself to his uncle’s fury.
“Try to escape, and the chains in which I’ve bound your heart will kill you in agony,” his uncle had warned him.
“As my sister got older,” Noah continued, “she came to resemble my mother more and more, and my uncle began to raise her as his own daughter. But everything changed that day...”
That day, it had been Noah’s prison guards who had been beating him, saying that they didn’t like the look in his eyes. In their frenzy, one of them had let a secret slip.
“If anyone should’ve had to die, it should’ve been you, you filthy slave! Not Princess Anna Marie!”
Noah’s eyes had flown open.
“In that moment, I lost even the reason to endure my suffering,” he explained. “I reached for the sky, blindly—without knowing why—and cast a spell.”
“A teleportation spell?”
“Looking back on it, isn’t it strange?” Noah mused. After Claudia had saved him and given him a new purpose in life, Noah had believed that there was no reason to dwell on the past.
He still believed that to be true, and yet he couldn’t deny that there were important holes in his memory that he needed to understand.
“As a child who had been raised in prison, I shouldn’t have known how to cast such a spell.”
However, he had appeared in the forest moments later.
Until now, he hadn’t even questioned how it had happened. He now suspected that magic had been used to cloud his mind, and that spell’s thoroughness vexed him.
“I had collapsed in extreme pain. It must have been around then that Princess Claudia began to recover memories of her former life.”
After that, Claudia had begun to wander the forest and come upon him.
So many strange events had occurred to bring him to Claudia’s side—too many to be a coincidence.
“You said that Lady Dorothea had told you that the trigger to dissolve her spell would be the magic of the one who pursued her. And the name she gave for the pursuer was Leonhard,” he said, finally lifting his gaze to meet Volkhard’s. “I believe now that the pursuer Lady Dorothea spoke of...was me.”
Volkhard watched him silently, his expression remaining unchanged.
“Noah,” Karlheinz finally said, a hint of exasperation in his voice. “When you’re before His Majesty, you must choose your words more carefully. What you just said could be interpreted as admitting you’re a threat to the princess.”
“As long as Lady Dorothea’s true intentions remain unclear, I believe it is only right to allow for that possibility to be considered,” Noah responded.
Karlheinz frowned in a way all too familiar to Noah.
Even though Noah was sure that Karlheinz had grasped his meaning, he decided to say it plainly.
“Our highest priority must be the safety and peace of Her Highness, both in body and mind. If my presence endangers her, then I have no right to exist.”
Still, he had no intention of running away or abandoning his duty.
“And yet, Your Majesty,” he continued, “I will not turn a blind eye to the others who threaten her safety. Whoever sent me into this kingdom as a child did so with a purpose. It was no mere accident that I arrived at Her Highness’s side.”
“That much is clear,” Volkhard said with a snort. “I suspect Dorothea’s revulsion of this Leonhard is likely related. This pursuer likely intended to use you as a puppet in some scheme.”
“Then, that plan has already failed,” Noah stated bluntly.
He lived freely and on his own terms. On the day he was teleported into the forest, Noah had chosen the way he wanted to live, not the way he wanted it to end, just as Claudia had told him.
“Whatever their intentions may have been, I believe the one who sought to control me has since replaced me with another.”
“Your cousin Sieghart, I presume?” Volkhard asked.
Noah nodded solemnly. “It’s possible that Lady Dorothea foresaw a future in which I wasn’t replaced—a world where I, and not Sieghart, became the puppet.”
Volkhard went quiet—perhaps because his thoughts had turned to his former consort—but he didn’t reject Noah’s theory.
“Karlheinz,” Noah said, “if there was someone who was manipulating Sieghart and held real power in Lemilsia, then—”
“Then we must remember that kingdom once placed its chief conjurer as Prince Sieghart’s guardian,” Karlheinz finished.
Six years earlier, when they had attended the Raushneur Academy under the sea, Noah and Claudia had heard reports about Lemilsia’s political affairs. Sieghart had even used magic to take on the appearance of a boy in his late teens so that he could attend the academy under the alias of Lucas. He was to graduate early.
According to the report that Noah had heard, it had been Lemilsia’s chief conjurer who had forced him to do so. The chief conjurer had been acting as regent in place of the ailing king and wanted Sieghart to return home.
“They are enemies of Princess Claudia,” Noah murmured. If even one thing had been different, Noah could have easily been one of them. That thought filled him with disgust.
Noah knew that if Volkhard decided to strike him down where he knelt, it would be just. Even knowing that, still kneeling on the red carpet, he bowed deeply toward the throne.