The day of the farewell party—thrown in gratitude for us before our return—finally arrived. Getting here had been a lot.
Mostly for Bertia, who had spent the week being hunted around the palace by Prince Ramtak and doing her utmost to flee every single time.
As for me? I was fine. I gathered the evidence needed to crush Ramtak beyond recovery, but that sort of thing was easy to do one-handed.
I wasn’t particularly busy, which was partly why I felt a twinge of guilt when I happened to pass Aleis in the corridor and found him looking gaunt. Looking at him, newlywed was not the word that came to mind. Out of pity, I helped with a bit of his workload. Mainly, the part where someone had to “encourage” the king to authorize the condemnation.
At first, the king hesitated. Given that we were talking about his own son, he wanted to handle things quietly. But after I made it abundantly clear how angry I was, then laid out, with evidence, what Ramtak had done and what he intended to do next, the king’s shoulders slumped. He granted permission for the public denouncement.
Unlike his son, the king wasn’t a fool. He may have looked muscle-headed, but his mind was better than that. Furthermore, as the monarch of a small country, he had no desire to provoke an international incident with a great power.
“To our friends, His Highness Cecil, Crown Prince of Alphasta, and Her Highness Bertia, Crown Princess Consort. With our deepest gratitude. Cheers!”
The party began with the king’s toast.
He must have been tying himself in knots inside, knowing what was likely to happen next, yet he carried himself as if nothing at all were amiss.
When we discussed Ramtak’s condemnation, the king made one request: if Ramtak managed to get through this party without doing anything foolish, we were to keep the punishment behind closed doors.
Public condemnation before a crowd and quiet, internal handling followed by an official notice were not the same animal. Even if the punishment matched on paper, the blow to the culprit’s spirit and the way the nobility remembered it were worlds apart.
As a father, the king had likely wanted to give his son at least a sliver of a future, to let him repay his debts and still have a path to stand up again.
I had agreed on one condition: only if he realized his wrongdoing on his own, reflected, and corrected his behavior.
That’s never going to happen. Even now, he was ringed by his entourage, wearing the eager grin of a man who could not wait for the spectacle to start. Had he simply been enjoying the party, I would not have objected, but that smirk promised something else entirely.
I could not imagine what it felt like for the king, watching from the throne. Beside him sat the queen, smiling politely. She had not been told about the condemnation. The king had decided that, if she knew, maternal love would push her to whisper my condition to Ramtak: that if he would recognize, repent, and reform, we would keep it private.
By all accounts, she was calm, composed, and fair. But when it came to her children, she was fiercely tender. As a mother, she might well have shielded her son with everything she had. Kindness was a virtue, but kindness alone did not make a queen.
When someone did wrong, they had to be made to atone. That was how one prevented the next, larger sin, the kind that could not be undone. And after the atonement, watching over them so they could truly reflect and rise again was what real kindness and love looked like.
Especially now. This plot could easily have spilled into a war that drenched the nation in blood. Crown Prince Aleis had come within a hair of being marked for death.
The one mercy was this: the worst had not happened yet.
That was precisely why he had to be condemned here and now: to create a circumstance in which he could actually reflect. The king understood that, which was why, despite his turmoil, he had agreed to proceed.
No, it was not because my “encouragement” had worked too well.
“L-L-Lord C-C-C-Cecil… when is he going to move?”
Unaccustomed to intrigues like this, Bertia was visibly tense. Not as a lady-in-waiting tonight, but as a frontier marquis’s daughter from Alphasta, Lady Cynthia attended at her side. She fussed over Bertia with a worried little smile, trying to soothe her.
“I couldn’t say exactly,” I answered, “but given his personality, he’ll choose the latter half, when the party is at its peak. That said, Seahealby’s people drink a great deal even at formal events, so he’ll likely act before the truly drunk begin to topple.”
Most guests tonight were Seahealby nobles. They kept their manners impeccable. At a glance, the proceedings scarcely differed from a party at home, though a closer look revealed their quick drinking pace. It was, in its way, impressive to down so much with such graceful poise.
“W-What should I do? I don’t think I can pretend to be normal until then!”
She clung to my arm, eyes darting like a nervous little animal. Adorable.
“It’s all right,” I murmured. “To him and to eyes that only see what they want, your restlessness will look like fear of being cast aside by me, or like anticipation, wondering when he’ll come to ‘rescue’ you.”
“Eyes that only see what they want? Specially made eyes? Are we talking glass eyes? He isn’t wearing spectacles, is he?”
Bertia flicked a glance at Prince Ramtak and tilted her head.
My dear Tia, before we get to glass eyes, perhaps realize there is no shop in the world that sells retinas calibrated to self-serving delusion.
Those eyes were queen-made—a unique inheritance that only he possessed.
Prince Izlarich’s, though also queen-made, could at least be adjusted to perceive his surroundings properly.
“Anyway,” I said, “until he makes his move, there’s nothing for us to do. This party was graciously held by Seahealby’s people in our honor, so we might as well enjoy it.”
“Y-Y-You’re right. Perhaps I should calm my nerves with a little wine—”
“Let’s not,” I interrupted. “Next thing I know, you’ll be bringing home a dragon instead of a snake.”
“That’s impossible! Dragons are far too large. I couldn’t possibly carry one.”
“So, the issue is size.”
Most people would point out that dragons didn’t just lie around waiting to be picked up. But Bertia wasn’t “most people.”
One day, she really might drag home a dragon, or something suspiciously close. “Too big to carry” implies a smaller variant might qualify.
Or worse, she’d find an egg. Yes, I can already see it. She’d think it’s a decorative rock or a bird’s nest gift. And before long…
I exhaled quietly. No. Don’t tempt fate, Cecil. The universe listens when it comes to her.
“Lady Bertia!”
Just as I decided to banish the thought from my mind, Miss June appeared. Escorting her was Prince Izlarich, whose cheeks were faintly pink. He was still not entirely used to walking arm in arm with her, it seemed.
June, on the other hand, clung to him with a bright, confident smile. The two of them had clearly grown much closer since I last saw them. The tension that once hung between them had softened into something almost sweet.
Good. It seems Izlarich finally swallowed that misplaced male pride of his.
He had once been the sort who, trapped by the notion of how a man should act, came off cold and overbearing simply because he didn’t know how to be kind. Once he realized that and made an effort to change, June had adjusted her approach in turn.