“I felt that the villagers were clearly acting strange.”
Apparently, the villagers’ eyes had seemed unfocused, and they’d all looked ready to cause a riot at any moment. It had been completely different from the enthusiasm and excitement that one would normally feel upon seeing the Dragon Duke in person.
“We also started feeling lightheaded as we were exposed to their excitement... The next thing we knew, someone had stabbed the Dragon Duke in the stomach with a sharp knife.”
While the knights had managed to suppress the culprit, they’d had a drug in their mouth and committed suicide. None of the knights had recognized the culprit, and they hadn’t been able to figure out where they had come from either.
Now that the perpetrator was dead, the truth had been lost forever.
After finishing his report, the knight wiped a copious amount of sweat from his brow. His face was completely pale, perhaps because Lady Opera had been glaring at him from start to finish. I ordered the knight to stand down, and he bowed deeply before exiting the room.
“Millefie, what do you think of the knight’s report?” Lady Opera asked me.
“I don’t know. But I think it’s clear that the person who stabbed Van wasn’t working alone.”
“I agree.” Lady Opera then began speculating based on what she’d heard. “First, I cannot help but think that the villagers were being manipulated by someone.”
“That might be the case,” I agreed.
On my sixteenth birthday, the Dragon Duke had shown himself in public for the first time in a century. Back then, while all of the dragonkin had been elated and excited to see him, none of them went as far as trying to force themselves through the crowd to get close to him. Everyone who knew the Dragon Duke respected him, and those who didn’t looked upon him with fear and awe. None would dare get close to such a person. Because of all that, it was highly possible that someone was manipulating those villagers with magic.
“But why would they want to kill Van and not me?”
Until now, I had been the intended victim of all the previous assassination attempts. Suddenly, the target had shifted to Van.
There were too many things we didn’t know.
Right now, the only other person I knew who was acting strange was Fenetra.
“Do you think that Fenetra was the one who ordered the culprit to kill Van?” I then asked.
“Was she not in love with him? I cannot imagine her plotting to kill my brother.”
Fenetra’s love for Van was unrequited. While she had tried to become his concubine, she had been rejected, and—
“She lamented that she would never be by Van’s side, so she tried to kill him...?”
I shuddered at the possibility. Just last night, she had come straight to me to try to nominate herself as Van’s concubine. I told Lady Opera about that.
“I cannot believe that she still thinks that we are my brother’s concubines,” she replied.
Is Fenetra truly the culprit? I asked Lady Opera for her opinion, but she could only confess that she didn’t know.
“If it were me, I would plot the murder of the Dragon Duchess consort and the attendant ‘Millefie,’ as she had refused my request to become a concubine.”
“You’re right.”
The lives of dragonkin, especially those of the Dragon Duke’s house, were long. It was very possible that the Dragon Duke would find a new lover after his wife was gone. So why would Fenetra try to murder Van if he was the target of her affection? It was a complete mystery.
A few moments later, we heard that Van had woken up, so we rushed straight to his room. The squirrels seemed to be concerned for him as well, since they had leaped onto my back and shoulders. As we ran, the knights pointed us straight to his room and opened the doors for us.
“Van!!!” I shouted. As I approached him, he raised his hand toward me and I held it in mine. “Your hand is cold,” I said.
“I made it cold so you can warm it up.”
“There’s no way you can control your body temperature like that.”
Van seemed to be healthy enough to joke around, so I felt relieved. He looked around at all of our distraught expressions and apologized for worrying us all. Roche, who was standing by right next to Van, bowed deeply to him in response.
“Brother, what exactly happened to you?”
“I don’t know myself,” he told Lady Opera. “At first, I thought that someone in the crowd just elbowed my stomach really hard.”
The crowd had apparently grown so dense that he couldn’t tell the villagers and his knights apart. He had also lost sight of Roche, who had just been in his line of vision moments earlier.
“I could only describe it as a wave of passion and enthusiasm,” Van said. According to him, he’d felt a dull pain in his abdomen, and the next thing he knew, he had been stabbed with a knife. “The incident is still a complete mystery to me. It felt like the crowd’s feverish enthusiasm was getting to me too.”
I asked if it was some kind of magic that someone had cast, and Van affirmed my suspicions, saying that there was no mistaking it.
“It’s a bit different from the type of illusion magic that fakes an emotion. I can’t be sure, but it might be some kind of dark magic—forbidden magic that forcibly manipulates a person’s emotions,” Van surmised.
Lady Opera had once talked to me about forbidden magic. Many of those spells were dangerous, and among them, there were some that not even the royal family was immune to.
“Even I don’t have in-depth knowledge about dark magic,” Van confessed.
“That’s fine.”