The Corpse on the Mountainside
My body had been dumped carelessly on the mountainside, like carrion left out for wild beasts.
It was at dawn that very day that I realized it.
"Hk— hck, hck—! Kehk—!"
The instant a searing burn flared up from the root of my tongue, a clump of blood surged back up my throat and out.
The ground beneath me was damp and cold. Without even thinking to wipe the blood from my lips, I stared blankly at the pool of it spilling onto the ground.
Ssshhhk—. The black fallen leaves the blood touched were melting away with a nasty hiss, as if doused in hydrochloric acid.
Proof that the blood running through my veins was a lethal venom.
And when it met certain special compounds in plants, the reaction was especially violent and dangerous like this.
Well, no wonder they treated me like a witch.
Scoffing at myself inwardly, I slowly pushed myself upright.
At least I was alive.
"…Ugh."
A cracked voice scraped its way out of my throat.
Those ungrateful bastards.
I stared at the scattered lights of Bilote Village in the distance.
"Evelyn, this is all for the sake of the village. Never— never because we hate you…"
The face of the village chief, who had poured his heart into that drivel, flashed past my eyes.
He took my herbs more eagerly than anyone, and he was the most enthusiastic of all when it came to feeding me poison.
Bilote Village—the tiniest of villages at the empire's southernmost tip, so small it didn't even appear on maps.
These were the people who had taken in an orphan and raised me, and I was grateful for that. So I had willingly sacrificed my body for them, again and again.
I chewed and swallowed poisonous plants until I hit my limit to bring on prophetic dreams, helping them prepare for plagues, droughts, and floods. I tested poisons and herbs on my own flesh to tell them apart, and brewed the results into potions.
But all that came back to me was the brand of witch—and a cup of poison.
Where did they even get their hands on such a cheap, crude poison…?
Ptui—! I spat the last of the blackened blood in my mouth toward the village.
The ignorant fools who repaid my goodwill with poison.
What they never knew was this: all the poisonous herbs I had chewed and swallowed to help them had forged my body into one that tolerated poison.
And that thanks to the poison they fed me—one breath cut short—I remembered everything.
All of it came back to me.
My memories from my past life. And the fact that this world was the one inside a novel I'd read in that past life.
I had no more time to waste here.
If they find out I survived, this time they might actually burn me at the stake.
I had to run. Now.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
First, I headed for the shack I'd secretly built halfway up the mountain.
A place even the villagers knew nothing about—part laboratory where I studied herbs and poisons, part secret hideout.
Had the shack's stuffy, stale air ever felt as welcome as it did today?
Still, I had no time for a proper farewell to the place I'd grown attached to. I swept everything off the drawers and shelves into my bag, grabbing whatever my hands could find.
Years' worth of herbs and poisonous plants I'd gathered trekking through these mountains.
Oh, right—I need my research journal too.
I crammed it all—right down to the tattered notebook I'd read and rewritten hundreds, thousands of times—into a single small rucksack.
There was no time for lingering. I bolted straight out of the shack and started down the mountain, unrolling the empire's map in my head as I went.
The capital and the empire's north are absolutely off-limits.
Those were the domains of this novel's main characters—their stage.
The capital and the north. The imperial family and the Grand Duchy. The Crown Prince and the Saintess, the Saintess and the Grand Duke of the North.
Every event, every love affair, every betrayal and power struggle unfolded there.
The east. The east is definitely my best bet.
Crunch. Dry leaves crumbled beneath my feet. I leaped lightly over a jutting rock and crossed the slick, muddy slope with practiced ease.
The instincts of a woman who'd scaled these mountains like a beast for over a decade, hunting for herbs, came back sharper than ever after my brush with death.
When I'd run hard enough that my lungs burned and my breath clawed at my chin, I'd lean against a tree trunk and catch my breath for a moment before pressing on.
I'll head for the eastern coast, where trade flourishes.
It even occurred to me that I could sell the herbs I'd gathered there, book passage on a ship, and simply leave for another empire altogether.
Why not? I had my knowledge of herbs and my knowledge of poisons, after all.
I'm confident I can feed myself anywhere I go.
Never again. Now that my memories had returned, I would never wreck my body helping other people.
Those dreams I'd mistaken for prophecy had only ever been scenes from the original novel surfacing in my sleep.
With the whole original story sitting in my head, there's no need to swallow poison for the sake of prophetic dreams anymore.
It was already all in here.
The future? Foresight?
To hell with all of it!
I was going to set up a quiet little apothecary somewhere peaceful and grow old and die in comfort, damn it!
I rose and threw myself into a mad run toward the forest to the east, buried deep in darkness.
Perhaps thanks to the steady doses of potion I'd swallowed on the way out, my once-dead body was recovering at a frightening pace.
How long had I been running?
The dawn fog thickened, and my vision began to blur at the edges.
That was when it happened.
From somewhere far off came the sound of a horse's hooves.
What—don't tell me the villagers are already…?
No. I shook my head.
They're not the type to climb a mountain before dawn just to check on my corpse.
It would take them a while to even notice I was gone. For all I knew, they'd be too afraid to ever climb that mountain and would live out their whole lives never knowing I'd vanished.
Then who is it?
I stopped dead in my tracks and ducked low.
This kind of situation was familiar territory. Encountering wild beasts while wandering the mountains in search of poisonous herbs had happened more times than I could count.
Just as I had back then, I stilled my breath and buried every trace of myself.
And moments later, a black carriage emerged through the fog.
Ahead of it, a woman knelt with her head bowed, ringed by men dressed head to toe in black.
The dress she wore—surely once gorgeous, once beautiful—lay spread out across the bare dirt, caked in mud, utterly out of place.
Then.
Shring—. The cold ring of steel split the dawn mist. And then, a soft, wet sound.
Before she could even let out a proper scream, the woman's head fell, useless and swift.
A-are you kidding me…!
I clamped both hands over my mouth, barely choking down the scream that threatened to tear out between my fingers.
Very, very slowly, I began to back away.
Silently.
Without stepping on the dry leaves beneath my feet, letting even the sound of my breathing drown in the fog.
Just a little farther. Just a little farther and—
Crack—!
A dead branch snapped crisply beneath my heel.
Oh…
And the heads of the masked men turned, all at once, precisely toward me.
"Catch her!"
"Damn it all—!"
I whipped around and bolted the other way. But—whoosh—!
A sharp dagger came flying and buried itself in the ground right in front of my feet.
"Ack!"
My feet tangled before I could escape, and I went rolling across the ground. Before I could even register the pain, dark shadows fell over my sprawled body.
"Looks like a rat was hiding in here."
One of them seized me by the hair and wrenched my head back.
"Ugh!"
I groaned and screwed up my face, glaring savagely at my attackers.
"S-spare me, please! I didn't see anything, I swear! Nothing at all!"
"Where do you get off spouting such useless—"
I know. I know it's nonsense that won't work.
But anything's better than dying here without putting up a fight, right?!
Then the man got his first clear look at my face—and his eyes went a little wide.
"Well, would you look at that?"
Look at what? Look at what? I bristled, warily scanning the suddenly shifted mood.
The others turned to study my face as well, glancing back and forth between the fallen woman's corpse a short distance away and me, with an odd look in their eyes.
"…You look just like her."
Like what? Like who? Like who, exactly? You don't mean—that corpse?
I mean, granted, I was a corpse myself until just now, but…
I regarded the men with uneasy eyes. I had no idea what they meant, but one thing was certain: it did not bode well. Not at all.
Because nothing about this scene looks like a mercy-killing in the making, does it?
A sudden wave of bitterness surged up in my chest. I'd died and come back to life because of those villagers, only to die again here, of all places?
If this was how it was going to be, they shouldn't have saved me at all!
The heavens had never looked more hateful. I ground my teeth together until they let out a sharp grind.
"Oh, spare me if you're going to spare me! If you're going to kill me, just kill me!"
The man's eyes curved into a thin smile.
"Got quite the temper on you, don't you."
"You'll find plenty of people in this world with a temper."
When I snarled right back at him, a short bark of laughter rippled through the group.
Then the man holding me flicked his gaze down at the bag on my shoulder and spoke.
"An herb-gatherer, were you. How amusing. A face identical to that princess from Delmar, trudging around gathering herbs."
My shoulders flinched at his words.
What…?
The princess… from Delmar?
Startled, I turned my head toward the woman lying cold on the ground.
That woman… is the Princess of Delmar?!
Princess Ivelina Delmar.
A hostage sent to the empire by the enemy nation of Delmar—a tool of diplomatic amity.
In the original story, the Emperor had granted that princess to the Grand Duchy of Escarr in the north.
She did, in the end, marry the Grand Duke—but…
When the original heroine appeared, she was cast aside, and in the end she took her own life.
A princess abandoned by her own country, then abandoned by the husband she'd been forced to rely on in enemy territory.
Her mind broken, nowhere left to turn—it was perhaps inevitable that she made the choice she did.
No, wait, that's not the point.
She's dead already?!
Before she'd even met the Grand Duke. Before the marriage. Long before she was ever cast aside!
Why is a princess who's supposed to still be alive lying over there?!
As I stared in flustered disbelief toward the spot where the princess had fallen, the man gripping my hair looked down at me and spoke.
"As of today, you're the princess."
"…What?"
What kind of nonsense is that now?
The man peered into my eyes in a deeply unpleasant way, then went on.
"You're lucky. No need to waste fortune's worth of magic stones changing your eye and hair color to match."
With his free hand, he drew a small glass vial from inside his coat.
Inside the transparent vial was a grotesque, gnarled tree root stained dark brown—and it was twitching, ever so faintly.
"This is dokcho—the poison root. It will help make sure you never get any ideas of your own."
A poisonous plant? My eyes went wide at the root inside that glass vial.
Ordinary poisons shouldn't have been able to touch me at all.
But that writhing thing was a species I had never once laid eyes on, not in this life or the last.
Between the knowledge of my past life and a present one spent digging up and eating every plant in existence, I knew it instinctively.
That thing is dangerous…!
The moment I tried to bolt again, the other men seized both my arms and forced them down.
"Let go of me!"
"Living as a princess for a while before you die—not such a bad deal, is it?"
"Since when do you bastards get to decide that—mmph!"
One of them seized my jaw and twisted it, rough and merciless. Then, as if my opinion had never mattered to him in the first place, he spoke.
"Now then, Your Highness."
A fish-stinking chuckle followed.
"Open wide."