A Letter Without a Name

She had been right. Ella would ordinarily have kept to the dormitory used by the maids of the Imperial Palace, but after Dietrich shut Presepe away in the tower, he had chosen a handful of maids—Ella among them—and moved their quarters closer to it.

Easier to keep watch on her, no doubt.

Why ask?

"I heard a place had been prepared behind the West Tower."

Fenrik's crimson eyes turned toward the rear.

"That would be it."

"Grand Duke Fenrik, why would you—"

"Then I'll see you again. Please, rest well."

He gave Presepe no answer. He simply walked away, his footsteps steady and unhurried.

Left alone before she quite realized it, Presepe turned toward the church, stirred by an unease she could not name. Ella was still nowhere to be seen.

He dreamed.

A dream that was nothing but Presepe.

Within it, Dietrich spent a long while at her side. From her own lips he heard of the countless days he had never truly known—and had therefore so badly misunderstood—and he offered her what was sincere in him.

And yet, through the whole of that dream as it stretched on without end, Dietrich could not manage a single moment of genuine laughter. Not even as he looked upon her gazing back at him, whispering of love, her face opened wide in a smile like sunlight.

The moments when that same Dietrich truly smiled before Presepe were always the same.

When he himself urged Presepe to die with him, and she did as he wished.

Only then did he smile, and smile with perfect happiness.

But the dream did not end there. Over Presepe—who had chosen death beside him and become a corpse—an endless succession of vicious moments played again.

Presepe, beheaded by the emperor's command. By his own command. Presepe, fleeing, only to fall with her heart pierced by an arrow he himself had loosed. Presepe, weeping and coughing blood beneath a keen blade...

No.

I have no memories like these. I never did such things.

I didn't!

"Hah—!"

Torn from the nightmare, Dietrich lurched upright in bed, dragging in a harsh, ragged breath. His face, as he panted, was deathly pale.

He sat there and stared blankly into empty air, then passed a dry hand over a face beaded with cold sweat.

Ella had not lied when she said he was unwell, and that he had taken medicine and fallen asleep.

That very day.

From the moment Presepe chose a Bugged Choice, Dietrich had been tormented by things that did not exist in his own memory. Would he, too, recover every recollection of the previous cycles? Presepe's suspicion had proven neatly correct.

"Ha..."

His face grown markedly paler over the past few days, Dietrich let out a heavy sigh.

At first he had thought it was only fatigue, piled upon fatigue. That his condition was simply poor. But the memories of previous cycles would not leave him be, and they were not confined to the ending he and Presepe had shared. Every death she had met while pursuing his route, every cruelty—all of it unfurled through his mind as if something were planting it there.

Even when he drank a potent medicine and slept, the memories came as dreams. Waking changed nothing. In those memories Presepe was endlessly hurt because of him, and endlessly died. He had even killed her with his own hands.

"I never did such a thing..."

He murmured it in a voice so faint it seemed it might gutter out at any moment.

"I... I... Presepe..."

But whenever he tried to hold himself together with thoughts like those, something in the deepest place of his heart—a black intent coiled like a serpent—lifted its head and asked him:

"No. No, it isn't..."

Bright moonlight fell across him, and a deep shadow of dread settled over a face that shone, pallid, in the dark.

"Presepe..."

Very carefully, Dietrich spoke her name. Then he slowly turned his memories of her over in his mind. It could not last. Once again, new and unfamiliar recollections—things he had never actually done—began to crowd his thoughts.

And yet even among those memories, there was a moment he found himself returning to again and again.

The very scene in which Presepe had wept and whispered the truth of her heart.

The new memories were too agonizing to accept as real. And yet, if he tried to call them all lies—mere phantoms he had seen—that one moment kept lingering. In the end Dietrich could commit to neither, and so he gnawed at himself.

Have I truly gone mad?

At last.

It was in the moment the hollowed-out emperor asked himself that question.

"Your Majesty..."

At the low voice of his guard knight, Dietrich squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them.

He had suffered through the night over memories he could not understand, and only near dawn, drunk on medicine, had he managed to sleep. Now it was night again. He had lost nearly an entire day, and the work awaiting him would be piled like a mountain. This was a time when he had to pull himself together. He passed a dry hand over his face once more and gave a short word to enter.

"Your Majesty, are you feeling any better?"

The guard knight appeared the instant permission was granted, worry plain on his face.

Instead of answering, Dietrich gave a rough nod. Then, in a parched voice, he moved his dry lips.

"What is it."

The knight hesitated.

"Speak."

"There was a disturbance at the church around afternoon."

"The church?"

At a word he had not expected in the least, Dietrich's brow creased.

"They say someone destroyed a holy statue."

What the guard knight said next was something he had anticipated even less.

"And the first to witness it, they say, was Lady Presepe."

In an instant Dietrich's face went cold.

"What are you saying? Presepe was at the church?"

"She went to pray for Your Majesty's health. The incident occurred the moment she arrived. She says that she and the maid Ella saw a suspicious person. Grand Duke Fenrik came as well, saying he had something to report on the matter. But as Your Majesty was asleep, he said he would return."

A suspicious person?

Inside the Imperial Palace?

"And Presepe..."

The first thing he asked was not whether she was safe.

"Did they say she was connected to that suspicious person?"

"Ah—no, Your Majesty. I heard nothing of the sort."

Dietrich bit down hard on his lip.

Was she preparing, as before, to cast me aside like a worn-out shoe and leave? Was smashing the church's statue nothing but a feint—and had she tried to flee amid the uproar, only to fail...

Why that scene from the dream had risen in his mind just then, Dietrich could not tell.

"And also... a letter has arrived."

A neatly folded letter rested in the guard knight's hand. It was nothing like the correspondence Dietrich ordinarily received. There was no seal to declare rank or house, and the sender had not so much as written a name.

"We had Archmage Ivan examine it first. He says no magic has been laid upon it."

It was a matter of procedure that Ivan inspect every letter and object that came to the emperor. Even he could not read the contents beforehand, but against any eventuality he had to make certain that neither black magic nor a curse had been set upon them. Not that Ivan was particularly pleased about the duty.

"Give it here."

Taking the letter, Dietrich pressed hard at his temples, trying to settle the throbbing ache in his head. Then he unfolded the neatly creased page and began, slowly, to read.

As he took in what it said, his face began to freeze over, cold as midwinter frost.

"Your Majesty...? Why has your color—"

The guard knight was speaking, worry in his voice, but none of it reached Dietrich's ears. All that entered his eyes were the words mocking him.

The letter was brief. It sneered at the late empress, long dead—Dietrich's own mother—and it set down a secret of his that only Presepe knew. That was all. But those few lines were more than enough to make him suspect her.

Just as they always had.

From between his tightly closed lips came the sound of grinding teeth.