But just like Lady Francess, this wasn’t what he wanted to hear. When I called off my engagement with Ana, I’d tried telling myself that it wasn’t my fate to marry her, and by doing that, I’d convinced myself that was the truth. Both Lady Francess and His Highness were still young and full of vigor. I doubted they wanted to hear their effort was meaningless and that in the end, it was all up to luck. Without even consciously trying to, they’d try to identify where things went wrong and then correct it. Their thought process was different from mine as someone who’d already experienced a long life of learning to give up.
“I think your biggest mistake was not making Lady Francess queen right away and instead dangling it in front of her like a carrot to control her.” Since I was sure he wouldn’t listen to my true opinion, I decided to search for a specific point of failure for him.
“How was that a mistake?”
“Lady Francess’s attack was very well executed and had us backed into a corner. However, you hadn’t made her queen before this attack. If you had, I would have tried to negotiate with her and probably accepted anything she demanded. If I could at least save Ana, then I would throw everything else away. However, there was no royalty on that battlefield. Without a single member of the royal family in charge, despite this plot being spearheaded by them, we couldn’t negotiate and only had the option of fighting. The simple act of you not making her queen took away your great chance to negotiate a way to weaken our house.”
“What’s to say she wouldn’t take action according to her own agenda if I made her queen?”
“That right there is why you lost.”
“What do you mean?”
“I believe that things would have turned out differently if you two had entered a romantic relationship. If that had happened, she would have happily offered you her assistance and may have resulted in a different outcome. She might have not pushed her luck by launching an attack on our house. If someone as clever and resourceful as her came at us not with force but with her smarts, our house would have been much more frightened. If you had treated her better, you wouldn’t be in this situation right now.”
“A romantic relationship? With that girl with the emotional capacity of a rock?”
“I believe Lady Francess simply has yet to experience love. She was the fiancée of the king-to-be ever since a young age, but she never really experienced love with him. She’s not the type of person who enjoys playing with fire and has a strong sense of self-control. There’s no telling how she’ll change once she learns what love is like.”
Lady Francess wasn’t devoid of emotion. Though she was always smiling elegantly, in reality, she was silently suffering. She’d handled the ending of her engagement gracefully, which made everyone praise her as the Gold Rose, but in reality, she’d been terribly hurt inside. The reason she looked like she had no emotions and only thought rationally was simply because she was used to suppressing her own feelings.
“I highly doubt that she, of all people, would change simply by falling in love.”
“I disagree. Take me, for example. Until I met Ana, I was the type of person who was very brusque with women. I was so uninvolved with them that I made my mother worry.”
“What? You?” His expression was one of genuine disbelief as he stared at me.
Is this what people think of me? That I’m some kind of hopeless romantic who thinks love will always triumph?
“That’s really the only striking difference between you and me,” I said. “You put Ana and Lady Francess on a scale and then used Lady Francess as your pawn. As such, you never built a relationship of trust with her. However, my bond with Ana is deep. That’s why when Lady Francess attacked, Ana chose to fight with me, and that’s how we won.”
Ana’s awakening had only happened due to her determination to fight, and that was only due to her believing in us without a shadow of a doubt. Getting to that point wasn’t easy. People weren’t nearly as altruistic as they thought. Even if someone thought they were acting out of the goodness of their heart, almost nobody really did things purely because they were a good person. On some level, it was always some kind of show to make yourself look good, or to feel proud about how good a person you were, or because you expected something in return. There were so many kinds of selfish desires woven in with altruism that you’d never really notice the impurities in your acts of good.
It was normal to feel irked when someone didn’t thank you for doing something out of the goodness of your heart. That was why, in most cases, people wouldn’t have awakened like Ana had. True, pure altruism was feeling happy about saving someone from a hopeless situation, regardless of whether anybody thanked you, or made fun of you, or laughed at you as a hypocrite; regardless even of whether you destroyed yourself in the process of doing something good. That was the level that needed to be met, and it wasn’t something that normal people could reach. The only ones who could were people who had extremely pure and strong feelings, and Ana was one such person. She’d shown that she was one of the rare people in history who was truly altruistic.
“Ha ha ha... So Dietfried dropped his claim to the throne because he was drunk on love, and I lost my chance at the throne because I was indifferent to love? Ha ha ha, I suppose this generation of royals is filled with people destroyed by love.” The first prince began laughing to himself.
His laughter sounded sad to me. I couldn’t help but wonder whether or not he, the very same person who’d led both Hugo and Lady Francess to ruin, had also been doing his best to live.
His Majesty was restored as king, and the political landscape shifted substantially. Both the first prince and his mother, the king’s concubine, were stripped of their titles and incarcerated in the prisoner’s tower. If His Majesty killed them, he’d earn the dirty title of a regicide monarch, so instead he locked them up. Most of the time when royalty committed large crimes like this, they ended up imprisoned rather than executed for this very reason. I’d probably never see them again; once they were in that tower, they’d remain there until they died.
The king’s concubine had another child besides the first prince—the first princess. She was still in middle school and was not jailed; however, she did have her royal title stripped from her and was sent to a convent.
With His Majesty returning to the throne, House Lillard could finally also be dealt with. They were part of the first prince’s faction. If their punishment had been left to the first prince when he was still in power, it would’ve been a mere slap on the wrist, at which point, House Sevensworth could’ve dealt with them as like in a territory war, but that would’ve only resulted in the deaths of the people we’d captured while their house and its status lived on. In order to destroy them completely, we’d had to wait until His Majesty became king again so he could pass judgment. Now we could finally send them before the king after all the time we’d kept them imprisoned in the Sevensworth territory.
The ones facing judgment weren’t just House Lillard but the great number of houses that had conspired to assassinate the royal family. Now, their houses were no more and their territories were split between the royal family and House Sevensworth.
As thanks for our house’s great contribution in helping him wrest back control, the king was very generous with the number of territories he granted us.
Though this meant that we yet again had even more territory, I couldn’t exactly say I was happy about it. More territory just meant it was harder to manage everything. Since I needed more people to help with these territories, my mother-in-law suggested that I recruit Eric Jones and bestow upon him the title of count. In other words, my elder sister from House Adolni would become the wife of the lord of a large territory. Though I trusted them both, I was still incredibly worried about giving such a big responsibility to my sister. However, there weren’t many people I trusted, so it seemed like the best option.