A Month Until the Curtain Falls

There was a romance fantasy I had been reading with no small pleasure. The book was called Fairy's Garden. The fairy meant the heroine, and the garden was a sly name for the pond of men she kept—her own private reverse harem.

The plot was stale enough. A heroine raised on scorn in a commoner's house turns out to be an imperial princess lost in childhood, and the story follows the court intrigues she stirs while reclaiming her rank, along with the male leads tangled up in the mess.

It was the sort of cliché one was sure to have read somewhere before. Even so, the author's bright, bouncing prose and the slow, clinging pull of its emotions had drawn me in deep—right up to the moment loan sharks burst into my home and, fleeing them, I was struck down in a traffic accident.

The ridiculous part was what I managed to grab while running barefoot. Not my phone. Not my wallet. Only the book I had been reading until the instant before.

They say that when you die, you may carry into the afterlife whatever you happen to be holding. Of all things, mine was a book of no use to anyone.

As my vision slowly flooded red, I still thought it a mercy. At least I could finally be done with this wretched life.

My consciousness went dark. The last thing I saw was the book, soaked crimson with my blood.

And when I opened my eyes—

"Haa......"

I had lost count of which sigh this was.

"My lady, keep that up and the ground will cave in."

"I wish it would."

"Pardon?"

At my words the maid Rita turned, startled. I shook my head as if it were nothing, but the sigh that had already escaped me could not be hidden.

I looked toward the window. Night lay outside; within, the chandelier blazed. My reflection stared back from the glass.

Hair black as ebony. Skin white as snow.

Yes. This much, I've grown used to.

But the moment my gaze met those pure, high-carat golden eyes, my lips parted.

"Aine le Foregreen."

Before I knew it, I had spoken the name of the woman who owned this face.

"Yes? Why are you calling your own name, my lady?"

Rita, who had somehow caught the mutter, asked. Sharp ears, that one. There was no getting a word past her.

Once again I shook my head and told her it was nothing. She slipped out to draw water, murmuring as she went.

"The young lady's been strange lately......"

Left alone, I heaved a sigh with all the force I had been holding back, no longer caring who might hear. Then I looked at the window again. Nearly a week of staring at this face, and the beauty of it still refused to grow familiar. If the original me had ever laid eyes on it, I might have asked for an autograph before I knew what I was doing.

Aine le Foregreen.

Yes. As Rita had said, Aine le Foregreen was this beauty's name. And that beauty was me.

A great deal of the middle seemed to have been rather severely cut, but it was the truth all the same.

I had died in an accident while running from loan sharks. Of that I was certain. My mind had gone dark, and I had believed that was the end—yet when I opened my eyes, this was the body I wore.

It was not mere reincarnation. How could I be so sure?

"Oh, that's right, my lady. There isn't much time left now, is there? The banquet celebrating Her Highness the Princess's return. What sort of person do you suppose she is? They say she lived as a commoner until she was found. I'd love to see her, even once."

Rita, back already, prattled on about things no one had asked. And with that, I felt the last confirming blow land.

A girl of common birth reclaiming her place and becoming an imperial princess was hardly the sort of upheaval that happened just anywhere.

Above all, this world was achingly familiar.

And no wonder. I was inside Fairy's Garden, the very novel I had been reading.

If that had been all of it—well. Truly absurd, and yet I could have lived with it.

The trouble was that it did not end there.

A complication was lying in wait. A real one. A truly, truly enormous one.

"You'll be attending the banquet with your fiancé, His Grace the Grand Duke of Reinhardt, won't you? Kyaa!"

Once again Rita reeled off facts nobody had requested. On an ordinary day, knowing the original owner's temperament, she would have kept her mouth shut. The subject, however, was the subject, and she was plainly beside herself.

Then she felt my eyes on her. Too late, her face crumpled with the look of someone who had just realized her mistake, and she ducked her head. Unlike the brightness of a moment before, her slender shoulders trembled.

"I—I forgot my place...... I-I'm so sorry, my lady!"

She even dropped to her knees in formal penance. Watching someone older than I kneel and beg forgiveness was hardly pleasant, so I answered in a worn-out voice.

"It's fine. You may go."

"Y-yes! Then have a good night!"

Rita fled as if afraid I might call her back. Left alone before I quite noticed, I gave in at last and pressed a hand to my brow.

The Grand Duke of Reinhardt. His name in full: Asad lu Reinhardt.

My fiancé. The fiancé of Aine le Foregreen.

"I'm doomed......"

Despair seized me yet again. I had lost count of how many times.

Aine le Foregreen was, within Fairy's Garden, a femme fatale for the ages and a villainess hurtling toward a ruinous end.

Like the villainesses of every other novel, Aine was an utterly ordinary villainess.

Proud to the bone of her nobility, she could not accept that a heroine who had lived among commoners should dare become royalty. She harassed the girl by degrees, until at last she threatened her very life.

But the novel was thick with cliché, and so Aine was murdered in her turn by the male lead—her own fiancé, who had fallen for the heroine—and by the second male lead, her paramour. It was, in every sense, a villainess's proper end.

If she was merely a villainess, then what was this talk of a femme fatale for the ages?

Aine had a collector's mania. Not an ordinary one. What she collected were people—and only a particular kind: exceptional, beautiful men.

The first victim was the man known as her fiancé, Grand Duke Asad lu Reinhardt.

Asad, who had carried a long war to victory, became the empire's most desirable groom overnight. The lofty rank of a grand ducal house, the title of war hero, and a handsome face that perfected all the rest.

She wanted him, the object of every envy, but a grand duke was not easily taken. And so Aine turned to a contemptible trick.

To state it plainly: Aine le Foregreen was the treasured only daughter of a ducal house whose power would have taken offense at being called second-best.

The duke, who loved his daughter past all reason, heard her plead that she wanted Asad and conceived a single clever stroke.

A promise made long ago with the Grand Duke of Reinhardt.

So far back that not even the memory of it remained, an ancestor of House Foregreen had once lent the Grand Duke of Reinhardt a colossal sum. The two had been friends of many years, and for the sake of the Reinhardt duke, who found the debt a burden, Duke Foregreen had a merely formal note of loan drawn up. Its term was indefinite—which was to say, it might as well not have existed.

The House of Foregreen, having somehow unearthed that note, abruptly demanded the whole vast debt be repaid at once.

Time, of course, had changed the worth of money, and the sum had swollen past all reason. Paying it in a single stroke was impossible. Counting on precisely that, the duke brought about an engagement between the grand duke and his daughter.

And so Aine laid hands on her first collectible.

The second......

Remembering him, I let out a long, heavy sigh. Asad was trouble enough, but this one was no less dangerous. Was he not the very man who, when Aine's punishment came, stole in an instant the life Asad had spared her as a final mercy?

The King of Contract Assassination.

Guild master of the largest assassination guild, and a man called by that title. His working name was Jay.

The truth is, he has a real name of his own.

Think on that too far and my head might burst, so I set it aside for now.

Jay was a man whose heart could not be read. He was so black inside that I could not begin to imagine what the author had been thinking, writing a character like him.

For one thing, he was beautiful and strange enough to earn a place in Aine's collection. The mere fact that he led an assassination guild was already more than enough to pass the test for peculiarity.

Even the duke did not know it, but Aine had been making use of the assassination guild—more precisely, a guild of commissions—since she was very small. From the most trivial errands to requests dangerous enough to threaten a life.

If it would see her will done, she gladly laid down enormous sums, and somewhere along the way she became a VIP of the assassination guild.

Not that anyone becomes a VIP of an assassination guild for lack of better things to do. It only meant that the evils she had committed in secret were that many.

Curious about the heedless young lady who came and went through his guild as casually as sitting down to a meal, flinging vast sums even at petty dealings the way one tosses alms to a beggar, Jay one day took a commission himself.

And then Miss Aine le Foregreen, VIP of the assassination guild, felt her collecting urge flare all over again at the sight of Jay's face. Forgetting what she had come for, she said this:

I could still see it clearly—the moment I muttered that she truly was not in her right mind. She had forced Asad into her possession, and then gone on to take a lover besides. A dangerous game, and the man in question was the King of Contract Assassination, rumored capable of taking even the emperor's head.

In any case, Aine paid a fortune greater than every sum she had offered until then combined. Jay, whose curiosity about her had come to outweigh the money, willingly stepped into her collection.

None of it had been sane even to that point. The most staggering piece of all was the third, and last.

The moment I thought of that one, my head began to ache of its own accord. A glance at the time told me dawn was already near. I left the window seat and lay down on the bed.

This one thing, at least, was genuinely wonderful. In my old life there had been no bed to speak of. Never knowing when the loan sharks might come for me, I had slept curled tight as a shrimp, fretting through every hour. The chronic fatigue I carried without rest vanished the instant I entered Aine's body, as if it had never been.

The food was delicious besides, and she had insisted on nothing but the finest cloth, so even the touch of it against my skin was clean and pleasant.

And what does any of it matter? Come the day of the banquet celebrating the heroine's return, all of it disappears.

Asad would stand there as my partner, and Jay out of curiosity. Both of them would fall at a single glance for the heroine—artless and pure, nothing like a noble at all.

They would try to draw near her, only to find the existence called Aine standing in the way. They would come to resent that obstacle, and in the end, for the sake of their own love, it would be a gruesome-death ending.

This was not a problem I could solve by simply avoiding them. By the time I woke in Aine's body, her ties to Asad and to Jay were already in place. Asad, perhaps, I might doubt. Jay was another matter. Annoyance alone would be reason enough for him to kill me, and the odds of it were high.

Should I run......?

I considered it in earnest. But a duke who loved his daughter past all reason was unlikely to send me anywhere, and I doubted Jay—or that other collectible—would ever allow it.

As things stood, Jay was interested in Aine. If he decided she was playing hide-and-seek, he might only hunt her all the more relentlessly.

And the third...... those two, at any rate, would be more than capable of finding me. Yes. More than capable, and then some.

Ugh. So I was to die before I had even properly tasted this new life.

When was that celebration, again?

I rolled once across the wide bed, turning the novel's plot over in my mind.

Wait. This was the moment just after the heroine had been found, when she and the emperor were sharing the father-and-daughter affection they had never been able to until now. So in roughly a month, at the imperial banquet, the curtain would fall on my life.