Chapter 3. A Certain Sob (3/7)

"Philip! Waaah, Philip, I thought you were going to die!"

Ionia flung herself onto the bed where Philip lay reading and burst into great heaving sobs without so much as a greeting. It made a stark contrast with Ferdinand, who had never once come to inquire after the half-brother who had barely survived an assassination attempt.

"See? Alive and well, right here."

"No, Brother, you don't understand! Do you have any idea how frightening that is?! Hoo-hoo-hoo-hooo-hnngh!"

Even mid-wail, Ionia caught sight of Philip's wound and let out a squeak.

"Brother, don't you dare die and leave me behind."

"..."

"There's nobody else who'll play with me if you're gone."

To Ionia, Ferdinand had never counted as a brother at all. Philip studied his little sister, who was still nothing but a child. Crying her eyes out without knowing a thing, terrified that her brother might die — the sight was innocent, and...

Your mother tried to kill me.

...and yet it looked detestable. The child who knew nothing went on sobbing, purely out of worry, and the sound of it wearied Philip. This child's mother had tried to kill him. What would this child become when she grew up? She would not stay ignorant forever.

The King had flown into a towering rage over the affair. A hollow excuse of a father he may have been, but his paternal feeling was not entirely absent — and his fury that anyone would dare lay hands on what was born of his own blood must have burned all the hotter for it.

There was no one who did not guess who stood behind the attempt. A vacillating father, yes, but no dullard either. In any case, he had come down on the Queen like a hammer, and she was now confined to her quarters under strict order.

The assassins were all dead, and there was no thread left to pull. Was he simply to live out his days with nothing in his head but the question of who might come for him next? No — could he even live at all?

"Ionia."

"Yeah?"

"I don't hate you."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Philip gave a small laugh and slowly smoothed Ionia's hair. Nothing was ever gained from hatred. He turned that truth over in his mind, again and again.

"Is Lady Brien resting today?"

"Nope? She rested yesterday. Our Ungni is obviously going to be with me today!"

At Ionia's beaming smile, Philip's expression changed. Has that girl lost her mind? He rose from the bed.

"Ugh...!"

"Brother, what's wrong?!"

"Ah, honestly..."

He limped. It felt as though the wound were splitting open.

"Brotheeer! I knew it — it's that, isn't it?"

"That?"

"Love! You're hurt, but you still want to see Anne Ungni. You like our sister, Brother."

"'Ungni'... and what in the world is that strange word supposed to be?"

"Whaaat? It's cute!"

Philip ground his teeth. Her leg was hardly healed, and she was playing maidservant? No matter how frightening the Queen was, this was too much. The Queen was locked away now, with no leisure to spy on anyone — and short of being present in person, she would never connect the magic quill to a girl barely on the verge of thirteen.

She could simply have pleaded her injury and stayed abed, but no — she just had to... Honestly, what a strange girl.

He left his room and came face to face with Diana standing in the corridor. He wanted to seize her that very instant. He could not.

Diana looked perfect to the point of being hateful. Not even her gait carried the smallest disorder, and that composed, flawless bearing only stoked his anger.

"I greet Your Highness."

Diana gathered her skirt and bowed, dipping her knees just so — her leg did not appear to trouble her at all. After all that bleeding! Philip clicked his tongue inside.

"I heard the news. Are you quite well?"

That placid question made something lurch in his chest. Look at the wretched state she's in herself. Philip raked his hair into disarray, wrestling his anger down. Ionia was right there. One slip, and it would reach the Queen's ears — and Ionia's maids belonged to the Queen's circle besides. He had to be careful.

"Yes, I'm very well."

Even as he said it, he fixed Diana with a glare and spoke.

"Ionia."

"Yeah?"

"I have a favor to ask."

"Yeah! What is it?"

Girls her age are never this obliging.

"Read to me. All day, today."

"Wh-why?"

"I'm terribly bored right now. Entertaining myself alone is truly hard work, you know. You'll help me."

Philip went back into his room. Ionia, delighted, hurried off to fetch her books. One look at the list and Philip's face stiffened blue. Ugh, that one I do not want to hear... Ionia's taste in books was simply too...

As Ionia settled herself to read aloud, Philip frowned over at her maids.

"Too many people. It's noisy, and I don't care for it."

"Okaaay! Then everyone out except Anne!"

Ah, honestly, this girl has no idea. But the great failing of people with no idea is that they believe they've read the room perfectly. Philip finally settled the matter by fetching a chair of his own, and so it was that he was subjected to the sound of Princess Ionia's reading.

"The traveler stepped into the room, and there the master of the house stood, boiling something in an enormous pot."

"..."

"The moment a fingernail bobbed to the surface of the broth, the traveler fled without a moment's delay—"

Mana Pet before, and now the books too — why does she always love this sort of thing? Ionia adored horror stories, the kind packed with grisly detail above all.

"The master who pursued him bore a knife in his hand. Blood dripped from its edge, blooming into the shape of a flower—"

Philip glanced at Diana, sitting quiet beside them. Bored, it seemed, for she was reading a book of her own. What book? Curious, he looked at the cover.

What on earth is that?

Watching her gaze blankly at that riotously colored, shamelessly loud thing, Philip went stiff. She looked every inch a girl who should have preferred ladies' romances or histories — why, of all things, an absurd guide to becoming a spirit summoner? For no reason he could name, his head began to throb.

"Ah... ugh..."

The moment Diana stepped down from the carriage, she nearly folded in two. Her injured leg burned with a numb sting. All that walking as though nothing ailed her had pulled loose the wound she had only just coaxed into closing. Blood was probably seeping through by now.

"Lean on me as you come down, my lady."

"Where are the maids?"

"The head maid has set them to tidying the kitchen instead."

Diana nodded. With one hand resting on Giscard's arm, she limped to her heart's content. They had passed into the house and were just reaching the stairs when—

"I can walk the stairs myself now—wh—!"

Giscard reached out and swept her up into his arms.

She began a protest out of principle, then gave it up almost at once. She kept telling him she was fine, so why did he insist on this? It had been the same yesterday, too. Ever since Princess Sasha passed away, he had trailed at her heels, attending her every moment. It felt strange, this closeness. They had never been so intimate even in her past life. What would the Giscard of that life think, seeing him like this...

"And what, exactly, is all this?"

The cold voice snapped Diana back to herself. It was Emil. He had just come out of his room and stood staring at Giscard, who held Diana gathered in his arms. His face twisted with spite, teeth bared.

Then, without a word of warning, he closed the distance and struck Giscard across the cheek. At the same instant, Giscard's arms clamped tight around Diana. Did he even realize that one wrong jerk might have sent the woman in his arms crashing down as well? Diana looked up at Emil — then quickly down at Giscard, whose cheek now wore the blow.

Put me down.

Diana pushed at Giscard as though to say just that, but his arms were iron and would not part.

"Is this why you dragged a slave home? To pull stunts like this?"

Emil snarled.

"Giscard. Put me down."

At that, Giscard reluctantly lowered Diana to the floor.

"Emil, don't talk like that. I hurt my leg, that's all. Giscard was only carrying me."

"You hurt your leg? How?"

"Something happened."

Even as she said it, Emil flipped up the hem of her skirt with a flick. Her ankle and her drawers were bared, lewdly and unmistakably.

"Eek!"

Her face flamed scarlet. What was this? Why was my—! Diana had been a decorous, well-bred young lady, and she swore she had never once behaved so. This was the sort of leering game played on a woman of the streets.

How could my own brother inflict this humiliation on me! Past all bearing, Diana slapped Emil across the face.

Emil's hand flew up at the sight of it — and then curled into a slick, twisted smile.

"AAAAAAAAGH!"

In the same instant, Giscard's scream tore through the house. The restraint collar was glowing a blood-curdling crimson. Clutching his throat, he doubled over and rolled on the floor.

Wait — what is this?

This was the pain the collar delivered? Watching him drown in it — face flushed dark, drool stringing from his mouth — Diana's eyes flew wide.

"Emil, stop it, Emil!"

Diana's voice came out a shriek. Giscard's cries of agony rang through the halls. In that moment, terror of the rawest kind seized her whole body. She grabbed Emil and shook him.

"I told you to stop!"

"The one in the wrong is that dog, daring to look at the master's family with lust in his eyes!"

"I'm the one who slapped him! If you must beat someone, beat me!"

Diana screamed.

"Oh, you want me to hit—"

"Big brother!"

Alexa came out of her room. Her eyes went as wide as a rabbit's, and at the sight of Giscard lying there, screaming, she shrieked and crumpled where she stood. She looked down at Giscard, then raised her eyes to Emil as though she had never laid eyes on him before. Her face had gone white with fright.

Emil revoked the command. Giscard clutched his throat and broke into ragged, hacking coughs.

"So it really does hurt him. Huh."

Diana shuddered from head to foot with humiliation. So he was this kind of person all along? The Emil of her past life had been temperamental at times, but never this. He hadn't been a wonderful, exemplary brother, no — but theirs had been a passable bond between brother and sister; he had even wished her happy birthdays. Yet the moment she took it upon herself to drive out Mirva, he turned on her like this, showing his hostility in the open and heaping disgrace upon her.

"Emil, big brother..."

"What?"

"How could you do this to me?"

Emil snorted and shouldered past her. It was always Diana who demanded conversation, and always Emil who mocked her for it.

"How could I do this to you? Pfft, hahahaha."

He parroted her words in a deliberate, singsong drawl, needling her. At the sight, cold flooded into Diana's eyes.

"The humiliation you dealt me today — I will never forget it. Brother."

Diana's warning came down like frost. Emil answered only with peals of laughter. Apparently even her fury amused him.

The next day, the door of Emil's room burst open with a bang.

"You insolent boy! What exactly have you been doing with yourself?!"

Duke Brien's face was flushed scarlet as he stormed in. Emil, who had been feigning study, started violently. He scrambled up from his seat, and the Duke thrust the papers into his hands.

Emil was a student of the Academy in Tallinn, capital of Farnborough. The blood drained from his face.

Not the forged grade report — the real one had arrived. And of all the cursed timing, the professor's academic warning had come with it. But he had bribed a servant to intercept that letter and bury it. How could this have happened?

"I've seen it all. Bullying commoner children, are you?!"

"That's..."

"That is not the question! Is it true you got beaten bloody in the middle of tormenting them?!"

Emil could not answer his father. The Duke was a man of plain austerity, always spoken of as a paragon of dignity. But if his own son acted in precisely the opposite fashion... could such a thing be forgiven?!

"What's the matter, Father?"

A gentle voice drifted in. Emil knew that voice. Diana. She entered the room and looked at him with wide, startled eyes.

She stepped closer and glanced at the documents their father held. Then she clapped a hand over her mouth, the very picture of shock, and turned to Emil.

"But Emil always had such good marks, didn't he? What in the world..."

Diana studied him with an air of perfect, placid innocence. Looking at that shameless face, Emil understood at last. She did this.

"Giscard, are you all right?"

Once Emil had swept past, Diana hurried to Giscard's side. He was still gasping for breath. Drool had pooled at the corners of his mouth — that was how much it had hurt him.

How much — how much must it have hurt? So this collar was such a monstrous thing.

Diana shut her eyes tight. The only reason she had not touched Emil was that he was her brother. A poor excuse for one, but some thread of family feeling, however thin, had always bound them. And until now, Emil had never done her direct harm.

Something like this had happened once before, she thought — though she could not even recall what it had been about. Emil had flown into a rage at her out of nowhere, and Diana, feeling wronged, had tried to explain her side. In reply, Emil had knocked over the vase beside her and shattered it.

He called knocking over the vase an accident, and came to Diana as she sat crying alone in her room.

"See? Now things are awkward between us."

"..."

"I hate it when we fight like this."

"We fought?"

And who was it that flew into a rage out of nowhere? What she had offered was merely an account of her own position. But Emil said it anyway, in a voice meant to soothe her.

"I didn't feel good about it either, Anne."

"..."

"You came out with that so suddenly, I suppose I lost my head."

"..."

"Let's both try a little harder to be considerate of each other."

And so their quarrels always, somehow, became her fault. Yet Diana had believed that ending a good one — for afterward, Emil would be an affectionate brother for a while.

She, for her part, had thought it only natural to accommodate the brother who would one day head the family. He was frightening when his temper flared, but at times he could be gentle like this. He had never struck her, after all; he had never been someone she feared. But Emil grown to manhood had not been a good brother.

A good brother would never have fled this estate in the first place, leaving her behind alone. Whatever Mirva was to him — mother or not — venting his fury on Diana, unilaterally, over a woman cast out for her own misdeeds was wrong, and so was turning his rage on Giscard.

Which was why Diana had struck first, at her own flesh and blood. This had been a warning.

She knew a great many of Emil's secrets. She knew of the forged grades, because when he was young he had asked her, point-blank, to hide the letters that came from the Academy. She knew, too, that he skimmed from the estate's coffers and used the money to toy with commoners.

If he pushed her any further, she would have no choice but to speak of the rest to their father. Diana said, her face the picture of innocence:

"Is this an academic warning? If it's come to this, any number of letters must have arrived before now — who on earth has been losing them?! Father might think you took no interest in our education at all."

Emil's face mottled red and blue. Diana's eyes sank into an endless, glacial calm. He glared at her, features smoldering — but Diana was not the least bit afraid.

"You're right about that, Anne. Your brother has disgraced this family thoroughly... very thoroughly indeed."

The Duke's voice rang cold.

"But Emil must have had his circumstances. And losing to commoners, of all things — surely there was some plot behind that as well. Emil was never so weak as that, was he?"

"No. These grades say your brother is trash not only in his studies but with the sword as well. He doesn't so much as reach the average."

Dripping fury laced every syllable of the Duke's voice.

"I... I misjudged my own son. This is why the mother matters so."

To any stranger's ear it might have sounded like blame laid on their late mother. But Diana and Emil alike knew perfectly well whom he meant: Mirva. Emil's face flared scarlet. Diana had never wanted a 'comparison.'

"You will lodge in the west dormitory and apply yourself to your studies for the time being."

"F-Father!"

This much is enough. The west dormitory was where parents sent children they wished put through discipline of the harshest kind. Suddenly confined there, Emil erupted in fury.

She knocked at Giscard's door, but no answer came. After a moment's hesitation, Diana opened it herself. The room he had been moved into was one reserved for the servants — the small chambers set aside for personal maids and footmen. Even at a glance, Diana found it cramped. Giscard lay curled up on the little bed within.

That body of his, grown so broad without her ever noticing, made the room look smaller still. The day Emil had triggered the collar and wrung that agony out of him, Giscard had coughed without cease. He had suffered a long, long while.

He had always been a proud, aloof man. In her past life, too — always. If nothing else, he had never once let her see him grovel. And yet he had lain there, face scorched red, drool smeared to his chin. Yes — to turn a man that aloof into a slave, cruelty of precisely that measure must have been required.

What, she wondered, had he felt in the midst of that pain?

Unbidden, the people of Lodbrok came back to her — the ones who had laughed at her suffering. The queen who was the king's slave. People had watched her writhe, and laughed.

And what are we now, if not exactly what they were? Diana reached out a hand toward Giscard where he lay. By tormenting me, you made me learn the shape of your torment.

That was why she could not simply sit still.

Diana brushed her fingers across Giscard's forehead. It was pleasantly warm, beaded with sweat — not feverish, she found as she touched it. She kept stroking his brow for a long while.

"I'm sorry."

Past life or present, Giscard must have endured things like this beyond all counting. The treatment the Giscard of her past life received must have been harder to bear still.

"I..."

Just then, Giscard opened his eyes. Sunlight caught the violet of his irises, and he winced. Diana, startled, moved to pull her hand away — but Giscard caught her wrist. Her fingertips still rested, half-touching, against his brow.

"What are you saying, my lady."

"You were awake?"

"I woke because you were touching my forehead."

Diana tried once more to slip her hand free, but the grip on her wrist did not slacken. He lay there, and she knelt beside the bed, her fingers still resting against his forehead. Giscard looked straight into her eyes.

"You have no need to apologize."

"..."

"It was my own failing — a slave presuming to set himself against the master's family."

Hearing him say it, Diana bit her lip. She knew that no one alive shared that judgment — no one, anywhere, thought Giscard had been in the wrong. Why had he grown so meek, so unlike the man of her past life? Diana dropped her gaze and said, her face clouded:

"I made my brother pay for it."

"..."

"It won't begin to compare with the humiliation you felt. But I did."

At those words, Giscard's eyes flew wide. He seemed genuinely, thoroughly shocked — so much so that the grip on Diana's wrist melted away like snow. He sat bolt upright in bed.

"What are you saying? That you quarreled with your brother — over me?"

"..."

"Over me? A slave brat like me?"

She understood he was only asking to confirm it, yet for some reason the whites of his eyes were webbed with red. He looked somehow desperate, somehow parched. As though this were a matter of the gravest importance.

Diana nodded at the sight of him. Why? Was this so strange? Even if one regarded Giscard as no more than a slave, this was the sort of thing to rouse anyone's fury.

Giscard stared at her, stunned. He gathered up the hand that had fallen limply from his wrist. It was small and slight — nothing at all beside his own, its knuckles thickened by years.

He lifted that hand and pressed it against his own cheek. It was the manner of a cat. Of a puppy.

Diana flinched in surprise, but he went on rubbing her palm against his face, desperate — like a beast aching for its master's affection, whimpering, almost.

And so Diana could not bring herself to take the hand back.

For a long while he simply held the warmth of it against his skin. Then, barely audible, he spoke.

"This is why... I can't take my eyes off you."

The words came out in a mumble, and Diana could not make sense of them. A faint shadow crossed his face. His upturned violet eyes glistened.

For some reason, her heart was pounding.