The Tyrant's First Command

"Is that so." Cesare asked flatly. "And who is the throne's new master?"

"Well, exactly as you predicted." Lysian closed and opened his eyes at his leisure, shrugging. "Every last member of the imperial family, Crown Prince included, died at the Thirteenth Prince's hands. Everyone but me, that is."

His low voice went on. "In other words, one might say the throne now belongs to the Thirteenth Prince."

"I see." Cesare nodded as though he had expected nothing else, tapping a light rhythm against the tabletop.

So it's playing out exactly as the original did.

If there was one difference, it was that securing the throne had taken barely a year. In the original, I could have sworn that dragged on for several more years.

Cesare chewed it over for a moment before giving up on the question. An original twisting under the butterfly effect of a transmigrator's arrival was common enough. Besides, it wasn't as though he had transmigrated into the original in the first place.

Which means he's probably starting to catch on to Cesare's crimes about now.

The moment he recalled what the body's original owner had done, his face hardened where no one could see. If Leoneld had learned the whole of it, he would already be contemplating tearing him limb from limb.

Sooner or later, he would need to slip away somewhere a great deal farther and emptier than this territory.

He was still turning over those tangled calculations when it happened.

"You're not the least bit worried about me?"

Lysian had closed the distance to point-blank range without him noticing, poking his head in with a sly grin. For a man who had just survived a war for the throne where lives changed hands like coins, he remained insufferably at ease.

"...But you are alive, aren't you?"

"Well, true, as far as outcomes go."

Lysian's eyes curved into a strange, thin smile. "If you had watched with your own eyes how much blood the Thirteenth Prince... Leoneld soaked his hands in to claim the throne, you would feel it in your bones. There has never been a beast so thoroughly mad."

"..."

The report that Leoneld had dyed the imperial palace red left Cesare with a peculiar feeling for a moment. But he shook it off and rose from his seat. "Thank you for the news."

As Cesare made to leave the dining room with his interest plainly spent, Lysian shot out an arm and caught him. "And where might you be going?"

"My bedroom."

He was just about to add that he was worn out from minding the baby all night and intended to actually sleep when Lysian cut in, grinning shamelessly.

"And do you think you can bear it, Your Grace?"

"...Bear what?" Cesare asked, regarding him with the eyes of a man genuinely creeped out.

"There is a saying, isn't there, that love is a double-edged sword."

Lysian let the loaded words fall and took another step toward him. A full span taller than Cesare, he looked down at him from above and prodded the skin just above his collarbone with one long, slender finger.

"Love is precisely the thing that tastes like sweet sugar at first and can turn to lethal poison in a heartbeat."

"...And your point is?"

"That you would be wise to be careful."

Lysian's eyes narrowed, thin as a serpent's. "You love your child desperately, Duke. But that love will not stay sweet forever. To love a thing is to accept that losing it will hurt every bit as much."

Cesare had no patience for all this circling about. Snorting at the ominous prattle, he shot back, "So what is it you are actually trying to say?"

"That you ought to keep an insurance policy on hand."

"Insurance?"

"I mean that making one more child might be a perfectly sound choice."

And with that dazzlingly beautiful face, Lysian beamed and spouted utter nonsense. "With that in mind, how would you feel about making the second one with me?"

Cesare's face contorted savagely on the spot. He felt like an idiot for having listened to any of it in earnest.

"...I've been wasting my time. I would have been better off holding a conversation with a talking potato."

Cesare wrenched his hand free of Lysian's grip and moved to shoulder past him. The instant his fingers found the dining room's door handle, a voice drifted from behind him, dropped far lower than before.

"It grieves me that you dislike me quite so much. Still, there is one thing you would do well to carve into memory."

The strange weight beneath the tone made Cesare falter and glance back. There stood Lysian, the man who always wore that featherlight smile, with a face gone cold.

"That you had best be careful."

Thud, thud.

Across a carpet gone slick and sodden with the blood seeping from every direction, a chill footfall echoed.

Looking down with numb, unfeeling eyes at the field of corpses staining the soles of his shoes red, Leoneld climbed the high steps toward the throne one slow stride at a time.

The throne itself was blotched with reeking blood flung across it from every side. Without so much as shaking the gore from his blade, Leoneld lowered himself into the seat, unhurried.

From the throne, he looked down. At the foot of the stairs lay the heads of his brothers, the Crown Prince foremost among them: the man who had deceived him all his life and pressed the poisoned cup to his lips.

To watch the great walls that had once held his life in their grip rolling about as mere lumps of meat was empty in a way that bordered on sickening.

"Your Highness, the Thirteenth Prince... congratulations on your triumph. No, forgive me. I ought to be addressing you as His Majesty the Emperor of the great Empire now."

From the very heart of the blood-soaked massacre, Leoneld's closest knight approached with bated breath and sank to one knee. With hands brimming with reverence, he carefully set the bloodstained crown, stripped from the previous Emperor's head, upon Leoneld's brow.

"...Who can say. It makes no difference to me either way."

He held the entire Empire in his grasp, yet not a flicker of feeling stirred in Leoneld's voice. With eyes of hollow, lifeless blue, he propped one arm along the armrest of the throne and rested his jaw on it at a slant.

"Now that you have ascended the throne, no one alive will dare scorn you or raise a hand against you, Majesty. The whole world lies prostrate at your feet."

"...Does it, now."

"To mark your rise to the highest seat you ever craved, what is the first thing you wish done? Only give the word."

The thing he most wanted to do.

At the knight's question, those cold, still blue eyes shivered almost imperceptibly. He had won the world. His revenge was complete. The shackle of poison that had gnawed him hollow was gone, and so was the hypocrisy of his garbage family.

And yet the summit of this vast power was silent enough to choke on. What he ached for, down to the marrow, was that sickeningly sweet scent, the one thing in this hell of a palace that had ever hauled him out of it.

From between the lips of Leoneld, sunk in thought amid the silence, a low breath of sound slipped free. "...Ah."

In that instant, a curve both cruel and rapturous drew itself across his vacant face. The corners of his mouth, keen as a honed blade, curled upward into something grotesque.

"Come to think of it... I do have a traitor to catch. The one who sprouted wings and fled from me. There was something I swore I would see done."

Feeling the weight of the crown, Leoneld slowly straightened in his seat. In his eyes, the obsession banked through the past year finally flared to life as though it had burst its cage.

"Issue an imperial decree to every corner of the Empire. Seal the borders so tightly that not a single rat slips through, and turn every territory inside out in the search."

The tyrant's lips, stained the color of blood, shaped the name he had longed for and cursed in equal measure, cold as frost. "Cesare von Valois. Find him, and bring him to kneel before me."