With a gentle clatter of wheels, our carriage rolled out from the palace and into the avenues of the Seahealby Kingdom’s royal capital.
On the way, the building Bertia had fussed over when we first arrived came into view: the campus of Cawin Academy.
“Lord Cecil! It’s here! This is one of the settings from the novel! This is where Lady June and the others deepen their love, face all sorts of trials, and spend their final year leading up to graduation!” Bertia leaned out to point, eyes shining.
Back when we first reached the capital, it had only felt vaguely familiar to her. But living in Seahealby had jogged her memory, and piece by piece, the novel had come back, especially the academy.
Hm? Hold on a moment.
“Hey, Tia,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Did you just say they ‘spend a year until graduation’?”
“I did. Is something the matter?” She tilted her head, honestly puzzled, utterly unaware she’d stepped on her own contradiction.
I let out a long sigh.
“D-Did I say something terrible?” she asked, flustered, fingers fidgeting with the edge of her sleeve.
She was still not grasping what her words implied.
I see. That would explain a lot. Threads that hadn’t lined up before began to knit themselves together, and the shape of this whole incident finally made sense.
“Tia,” I said gently. “Think back. Which year are Lady June and Prince Izlarich in right now?”
“Their year? That’s easy. Lady June and Prince Izlarich are both first-years and… Wait. In the novel, they were third-years, weren’t they? Huh? Did I remember it wrong?” Bertia’s confidence tripped over itself, an almost visible question mark bobbing above her head.
“It’s probably not your memory,” I said. “If they’re first-years now, but the novel takes place when they’re third-years, a lot of things start lining up.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, the timeline you know from the novel and the timeline we’re living in are badly out of sync. And because of that shift, some core facts have changed.”
At that, even more question marks piled up in Bertia’s eyes.
“To put it plainly,” I continued, “the ‘crown prince’ Princess Consort Lysonna married in the story likely wasn’t Crown Prince Aleis.”
“What?! But I’m sure in the novel, Lady Lysonna married the crown prince.”
“Right. She married a crown prince. Just not Aleis. The man she married was probably Prince Ramtak.”
“How could it have ended up like that?” Bertia’s voice leapt, scandalized. She was clearly drowning in contradictions. If I didn’t throw her a rope soon, she’d sink to the bottom.
The novel version of Consort Lysonna likely never met you. That Lysonna was a proud woman, anxious about marriage and fixated on title more than character. Would a woman like that have chosen someone as precariously placed as Crown Prince Aleis for a husband?
The answer was obvious.
Even if talk of marrying Aleis had come up in the novel, he didn’t meet the conditions the original her demanded in a spouse. So, in that timeline, she would never have chosen him.
I believe that when she failed to secure a match earlier, she waited until Prince Ramtak turned twenty and took over the title of crown prince from Aleis. If June and Izlarich were third-years in that story, Ramtak would already have reached his twentieth year. The timing fits.
Reality, however, had veered off.
Because Lysonna met Bertia, the novel’s plot twisted out of shape from the very beginning. Talking to Bertia changed what Lysonna wanted in a husband. More than that, it softened her outlook and tempered her pride. She came to value a partner who loved and cherished her, someone with whom she could breathe easily, rather than a man whose rank alone did the talking.
As a result, she accepted the proposal she would have turned down in that other timeline: marriage to Crown Prince Aleis. And by marrying earlier than in the novel, the identity of the crown prince she would’ve married shifted as well from Prince Ramtak to Aleis.
In other words, because the groom had changed, there was never any chance that things would proceed according to the novel, even if we’d done nothing. But with Bertia’s memories fuzzy and the entire timeline shifted, and with “crown prince” pointing to a different man depending on the year, none of us pieced it together until everything was already over.
“In that case, the future where Lady Lysonna is treated coldly by Prince Aleis?” Bertia asked, breath snagging on the fear that had haunted her.
“Given she married a different man altogether,” I said, “it would be harder for the future to end up the same.”
Bertia’s face blossomed with relief, a bright smile breaking like sunlight through rain. Realizing that Lysonna’s path had shifted toward something safer eased the tension in her shoulders.
“One more thing,” I added. “This is my conjecture, but in the novel, the reason the crown prince, Prince Ramtak, treated Princess Lysonna so coldly was likely strategic. Once he grasped how strong-willed she was, he probably provoked her on purpose to spark incidents. That way, he could force an upper hand over her homeland, Umyuve, or manufacture a pretext to confine her as a hostage while launching a war.”
“What?! That’s far too cruel!” Bertia burst out.
“It is. But when you factor in what Prince Ramtak was plotting, it starts to look very likely.”
From the beginning, Ramtak seemed to be calculating how to gain the upper hand over Umyuve or how to invade it outright. In the dossier detailing his crimes, we’d even found several plans along those lines, all of which had collapsed spectacularly.
Even so, that possibility was hard to dismiss.
“I’m truly glad Lady Lysonna married His Highness Aleis instead of Prince Ramtak,” Bertia said, pressing a hand to her chest.
“Agreed. And in a way, that’s your achievement, Tia.”
“Eh?”
Because Bertia had challenged Lysonna’s rigid assumptions, the consort had been able to choose happiness. Call it hindsight, but the truth stood regardless: Lysonna had seized a gentler future because Bertia had widened her field of vision. She herself wasn’t thinking about any of that, however. Even as I said it, she only tilted her head with a “do I really deserve credit for that?” look.
“Speaking of achievements, the nihonshu you brewed was a huge help this time,” I added.
“Now that you mention it, you were negotiating with nihonshu somehow. Don’t tell me?”
“You’ve probably guessed it.”
Bertia brightened when her theory landed. I went on to explain the terms I’d offered Futamata.