I lived in the castle and served as Prince Mars’s personal maid. I was the third daughter of a noble, but as I wasn’t the eldest, I wasn’t lucky enough to receive any good candidates for marriage. So, to live as a member of the nobility in the future, it was necessary for me to catch the eye of a nobleman with decent status while I worked as a maid. However, nobody paid any heed to my trifling ambition, and I was assigned a certain task.
Count Randolf, from the main branch of my family, ordered me to poison Prince Mars. The count was part of Prime Minister Gamarath’s faction, so the order probably came directly from him. Personally, I couldn’t even stand to look at either Count Randolf or Prime Minister Gamarath, but be that as it may, my family’s status was such that I was unable to refuse the count’s order.
Having said that, poisoning the prince was easier said than done. In the first place, he had a food taster. Even Count Randolf himself didn’t seem to expect the poisoning to succeed; he was probably just trying to make Prince Mars believe that his life was in danger, to weaken his resolve. Some people are truly nasty.
Left with no other choice, I diligently slipped poison into Prince Mars’s food. As a result, he witnessed the collapse of his food taster on three separate occasions, and stopped touching his meals altogether. Surely that would weaken him both mentally and physically.
Or at least, that was what I thought.
Prince Mars’s condition temporarily deteriorated, but then, he seemingly began getting his meals from another source. He quickly regained his vitality, and if anything, grew more robust than before. The count told me to investigate, and find out where he was getting his food, but I didn’t have the slightest idea where it could be coming from. I had already poisoned any and all food that entered his quarters.
Incidentally, one day about a year later, Prince Mars suddenly said that he would be having a normal meal. This was a surprise. I wished he had told me beforehand. After all, he hadn’t had a meal in a whole year, so I hadn’t mixed any poison into his food.
That’s right—I didn’t poison his food. But for some reason, Prince Mars collapsed after eating it anyway.
Hm? Why? I thought. I was incredibly perturbed, but Count Randolf assumed I had poisoned Prince Mars, and he commended me and gave me a small reward. So, I went along with it, and acted like it really had been me.
For three days, Prince Mars hovered on the brink of death, but in the end, he managed to recover. I had figured his poisoning was the work of someone else, so I didn’t make a move while he was bedridden, but that turned out to be a mistake. I should have taken my chance when I had it.
I had mixed feelings. I hadn’t poisoned him, but when he recovered, it looked like I had tried to poison him and failed. In fact, when Count Randolf found out about the situation, he told me, “Don’t mess up next time,” and gave me an even more potent poison than the one I had been using.
Luckily, after that, Lord Mars began taking his meals without a food taster, so it was relatively easy to slip in the poison. I thought it odd that even though he had almost died, he didn’t seem to be worried about poison. Could it have been that he didn’t care whether he lived or died?
Up until that point, I had only ever used a small amount of poison, so it would be harder to detect, but now I was a bit angry, so to teach Prince Mars just how harsh life could be, I just up and dumped the whole poison in before serving him his next meal. This was a type of kindness. I imagined that, the moment he put a bite of food into his mouth, he would reunite with the dearly departed queen in the afterlife.
But Lord Mars practically devoured his meal—the meal I had poisoned generously. Not only that, but he exulted in the joy of eating. “Aah,” he said. “Normal meals sure are the best.”
Hm. Something strange is going on. Why is he still alive?
I had even already set up another maid to take the fall for it, but all that work ended up being for naught. It wasn’t like it was my fault. Count Randolf must have given me a harmless medicine that he only thought was poisonous. Be that as it may, though, he was still a count, so without any evidence, I couldn’t tell him he had messed up.
I decided I would fill a cup with water, stir in a few tiny drops of the poison the count had given me, and taste it myself with just the tip of my tongue. The prince had practically inhaled his food, so I knew the poison had to be harmless. Even if it was dangerous, there was no way it would cause too much damage, and then I would be able to prove that Count Randolph had given me defective poison. That would put him in my debt.
I must have been the world’s biggest fool for thinking that. The second I tasted the water, my entire body convulsed, and I felt a jolt of pain in my throat that made it feel like it was being torn apart. I immediately shoved my fingers down my throat and made myself vomit up the contents of my stomach. Even after that, though, my body still felt numb. I was unable to move for a while afterward.
When I reported this to Count Randolf, he said. “That’s strange. He shouldn’t even have had time to take an antidote—it’s inconceivable that he’s still alive. Come to think of it, it’s odd that he survived last time too, even though I bought off the doctors and the healers.” He furrowed his brow and began to brood. If he, too, failed to poison Prince Mars, Prime Minister Gamarath would probably be furious with him.
“Lately, have you noticed anything strange about the prince?” the count asked. “Tell me anything, no matter how trivial it may seem.”
Anything strange? I hadn’t sensed any particularly large changes in the prince’s behavior. But maybe there had been something small. That reminded me—not long ago, the other maids were talking about how he had started wearing a ring.
When I relayed this to the count, he said, “A magic item? It can’t be. I’ve heard of rings that neutralize poison, but could he really have gotten his hands on one?”
This was the first I was hearing about such a thing. But now that the count mentioned it, I got the feeling that Prince Mars had stopped worrying about poison around the time he had started wearing that ring.
“Is that so? No, it must be so,” Count Randolf said. “That’s why he was able to dismiss his food taster without a second thought!”
I see. When he let his food taster go, everyone around him praised him for his kindness, but he was only putting on an act. I felt anger toward the prince well up inside me.
“All right!” the count said. “Tell me every little detail about that ring. I’ll have a fake prepared. After we’ve swapped it out, we’ll poison Prince Mars when his guard is down!”