The Emperor's Deathbed

The Emperor's failing health was no longer a secret, not at this point. For years now, he had been unable to leave his bed.

Yet the Chamberlain, who held up the setting sun of the Empire, showed no trace of despair. The man who had served the Emperor his entire life appeared as solid as a wall through which not even a needle could pass.

Rihard remembered when the Chamberlain had been younger. Remembered how the man had urged him to reconsider when he accepted the bargain the Emperor had offered.

"I will manage from here. You may go."

The Chamberlain regarded Rihard in silence, much as he had back then, when he'd tried to talk sense into a reckless young man.

But this time, he did not tell him to think it over. Instead, he bowed his head, closed the door, and withdrew.

Thud.

The heavy sound of the door echoed through a room so still it might as well have been dead. Rihard walked slowly toward the bed that consumed more than half the chamber.

"So you've come."

Death hung in the air. Rihard knew it instinctively. The Emperor would not last long.

"Yes, Your Majesty."

Through the gauzy veil, the Emperor's form was visible — gaunt, wasted, little more than bone wrapped in skin.

Rihard knew the Emperor's age, and so it was not difficult to recognize that this ruin was not the work of time alone. His gaze drifted to the Emperor's hands. Blackened, withered things that reeked of death.

"You've committed quite the interesting mischief, haven't you?"

"Me? What mischief could I possibly commit, lying here like a corpse?"

"Our arrangement was to locate Her Highness the Princess. Yet you instructed me to serve as her guardian without so much as explaining what that was meant to entail."

Rihard ground the words out through his teeth. The venom spitting from his lips made his fury unmistakable.

"Were you planning to marry me to the Princess?"

"...What did you see in the North?"

The non-answer twisted Rihard's face. Every instinct screamed at him to force the man to speak plainly. He was more than capable of it. If only Isabella weren't a factor.

Rihard drew a slow breath and answered.

"I saw a grave. I saw monsters. And I saw Her Highness the Princess."

"Sasha. Ah, how my brother's child must despise me for what I left her to endure..."

The Emperor's mumbling voice grew thick and indistinct.

"My brother... my brother is the one at fault. All of it, every last bit..."

The Emperor's unfocused eyes, shifting blame through a haze of mumble, had gone vacant. He was clearly delirious again. It seemed Rihard would not get a straight answer today either.

He clicked his tongue shortly. The Emperor would get what he wanted in the end, regardless.

"Very well."

He might be dragged along, but he had no intention of going quietly. Rihard rose from his seat with deliberate slowness.

"I will lend my strength to Your Majesty's wish to make Sasha Philliard Emperor."

"Ah, yes. That seat was my brother's to begin with, so naturally it must return to his child."

The Emperor's eyes gleamed bright and clear, as though nothing had happened. A dying man crushed beneath the weight of his own guilt.

Rihard could not even muster the will to sneer. He had a rough understanding of how the Emperor had come to this state.

The late Emperor's inspection of the North had included his only younger brother — the current Emperor. No one alive knew this, but Sasha had not been the sole survivor of the rebellion that ended in disaster that day. There had been one other.

"However, I have a condition."

Only one thing gnawed at him.

Rihard stood. When he pulled back the thin veil, an impossibly living skeleton stared up at him. Of that fleshless, bone-thin frame, only the eyes still burned bright.

"Your Majesty — how did you crawl out of that nest of monsters alive?"

What the Emperor and Sasha shared. Survivors of the North.

"What—!"

"Ah, I should have mentioned this first. Her Highness the Princess is remarkably sharp. She remembers everything from when she was barely six years old."

Watching the Emperor freeze, hollow and bloodless, Rihard let out a dry laugh.

"Even so — does Your Majesty's resolve to place Her Highness on the throne remain unchanged?"

Rihard held the frozen Emperor's gaze for a long moment, his dark-red eyes stripped of every trace of amusement. Then he walked out of the room without another word.

Thud — behind the heavily closing door, something shattered against it. A glass. He did not look back.

He hadn't even noticed. He couldn't have.

"I didn't expect to see you come out of there, Count."

The only person he craved had been watching him.

Isabella had swept her golden hair up in an elegant twist, pinned with a brooch shaped like a blue serpent. The emblem of House Belois. It suited her devastatingly well.

Rihard studied her in silence. Those green eyes that did not look away were achingly beautiful.

His hands curled into anxious fists.

Didn't expect to see me? Was that delight at an unexpected encounter, or—

"...What do you mean by that?"

"His Majesty has refused every audience for weeks now."

It took very little time for expectation to shatter.

"The gossip sheets have even run caricatures mocking the nobles who linger nearby, hoping for a chance to catch His Majesty's eye."

That sardonic voice. That measuring gaze sweeping over him. And only then did Rihard notice the others behind Isabella — the ones pretending not to be there while pouring every nerve into watching this exchange.

Familiar faces surfaced among the strangers. So the rumors about noble ears were true. The palace walls did have ears, apparently.

So the legendary magic was nothing more than an infestation of rats.

He was cataloguing the faces straining to eavesdrop when his sleeve was tugged. Lightly, as though the one pulling no longer considered him a threat worth guarding against.

Rihard did not flinch like a fool. He turned his head slowly instead.

Green eyes that concealed their anxiety poorly. Those black pupils were glittering with unusual intensity.

Ah.

Feeling his nerves stand on end, Rihard savored the instant when Isabella's attention fixed entirely on him. A spark caught fire in the longing to possess that gaze — that gaze, and nothing else — for himself alone.

"Count, what did you discuss with His Majesty?"

That instant — her question — was the moment his mind was made up.

The scale that had refused to tip even in the Emperor's private audience crashed down with a resounding thud.

The fastest way to hold that gaze forever had just become blindingly clear. Rihard smiled.

"I'm on my way back from announcing my engagement to Her Highness the Princess."

A heart that had known nothing but despair, dread, and agony began to pound with something like hope. Was this what it felt like when a single thread of light pierced the dark? Rihard did not miss the deep fracture that split across those dark-green eyes for a heartbeat.

"Engaged..."

Before she could even organize her thoughts, the murmured word trembled, thin and fragile. In that moment, Rihard felt a vile satisfaction. As though scraping the last scraps from the bottom of a barrel, he held Isabella's gaze and continued.

"His Majesty worries a great deal about Her Highness. As you know, Duke, this place is crawling with vipers who toy with people's hearts."

"..."

"One day they whisper that they love you, and the next morning they cast you aside without a second glance."

He watched the words land like a whip, watched the fine cracks spider through those dark-green eyes.

Could she actually be hurt by what I said? For an instant, Rihard fought down the urge to drop to his knees before Isabella and swear it wasn't real — that none of it was true.

Isabella did not love him. Ten years of history. That was the only certainty he had left.

Had she ever loved me at all? He did not want to think that far.

He wanted to believe that the girl who had once kissed him in a past now impossibly distant had loved the boy he'd been.

The boy had grown into a man. And that man still could not forget the girl.

He had thrashed against it, fought to bury it — only to discover it had been impossible from the very start.

"I owe His Majesty a great deal, so I've decided to remain at Her Highness's side to repay that debt."

That was why he had come back. Because he could not forget — and so he meant to reclaim what he'd lost.

A mongrel had already sunk its teeth into Isabella's side, but Rihard had no intention of retreating.

"If fortune favors us, we might even become family, Duke Belois."

Head cocked at a bitter angle, Rihard smiled again. This time, unlike before, the smile carried a thread of self-mockery.