Chapter 62
“Letters.”
“Letters? What kind of letters are those? I’ve never seen them.”
“They’re the letters of my mother’s country. Mother taught me. If you write like this….”
Argana watched, fascinated, as the end of the stick traced lines across the ground.
When Yetekerid finished writing, he glanced at Argana and said,
“That’s my name.”
“Can you write my name too, big brother?”
“I can.”
It was the moment Yetekerid took the stick in his hand again.
“Your Highness the Prince! Your Highness the Prince!”
Startled by the maid’s urgent voice, the stick dropped from Yetekerid’s hand with a clatter.
Argana saw her brother’s small hand trembling and reached to steady it, but Yetekerid pulled his hand away from Argana as if avoiding her and scrambled up out of the bushes.
“I—I….”
“Your Highness the Prince! Oh my! What are you doing in a place like this? Consort Bi is looking for you. There’s a strict order to bring Your Highness at once….”
An older maid grabbed the wrist of the child Yetekerid and hauled him up roughly.
When his face went pale, Argana sprang up from the bushes and stepped in front of the maid.
“I’ll go with him and pay my respects to Mobi.”
“Y-Your Highness the Princess!”
The maid let go of Yetekerid’s wrist as if she’d been pulled away and fell forward onto the ground in surprise.
Argana looked from the bewildered Yetekerid to the maid and then said again.
“I want to pay my respects to Mobi too. It’s been a long time since I saw Mobi.”
“Y-Your Highness the Princess. Right now, Consort Bi is—she’s unwell. So—”
“But you said you’re looking for my brother?”
The maid’s face drained of color.
She knew why Ryuroslav Bi had been shouting to bring her son here. And for some reason she felt dizzy at the thought that the young princess standing before her also knew the reason.
Argana said, “If Mobi is unwell, of course we should go to pay our respects.”
As Argana turned to enter the palace, the maid almost, without thinking, reached out and grabbed her. But Yetekerid moved faster.
If he hadn’t acted and grabbed Argana first, the maid’s head might have been forfeit before the day was out.
“No.”
Argana’s golden eyes fixed on Yetekerid’s pale face.
“No, big brother?”
“Yes. No. You can’t… go back. Later, later….”
“Come when Mother gets better,” he wanted to say.
But the lie wouldn’t come easily.
While Yetekerid faltered, Argana’s small hand gently wrapped around his thin fingers.
“All right. I’ll come again later. If you miss me, come to Cheonhwagung. You can also greet Mother there. Okay?”
“Ah—okay.”
“It’s a promise.”
When Yetekerid nodded, Argana shot a fierce glare at the maid still lying trembling on the ground.
“Take my brother inside. And because his hands got dirty because of me, help him wash properly. Then go and see Mobi. Understand?”
“Y-yes, of course.”
“Don’t be slack about it.”
Under the pressure radiating from the small girl, the maid could only repeat “yes, yes” without lifting her head.
“…So that happened.”
Kartak watched Argana quietly as he sipped the warmed ewe’s milk.
Since meeting Yetekerid, she had become oddly calm and composed. The palace was still full of fear; even though the culprit hadn’t been found, Argana alone seemed to know everything, as if she understood the whole situation.
“Do you really think Prince Yetekerid didn’t do it? Really?”
“That’s what I think.”
“You don’t have any proof.”
“Not none at all.”
Argana set the bead she’d been fidgeting with down on the table and turned to face Kartak directly.
“First, Yetekerid doesn’t have any retainers who could be entrusted with something like this.”
Yetekerid flinched as if his shoulders showed at that.
In Heehyo Palace there was only one eunuch and one maid left, and they were so afraid of Yetekerid that they couldn’t properly do their jobs. They followed Argana’s orders immediately, but had she not come, Heehyo Palace would have felt like a place haunted by ghosts.
“The eunuch and the maid were both too scared to do anything. Someone who can’t even handle their own master—do you think they’d have the nerve to kill others? That’s nonsense.”
Yetekerid laughed nervously. Argana ignored the laugh and continued.
“If he has no retainers, then the story would have to be that Yetekerid himself went around mixing poison. But that isn’t possible in this situation. If someone else did it, that’s a different matter.”
“Someone else?”
“Yes. Someone who would use Yetekerid to carry out this kind of thing. But intent is the problem. Why kill lower servants? And why randomly? What would spreading fear throughout the palace serve?”
Murmuring to herself, Argana’s eyes suddenly widened.
“Wait—inside the palace….”
“What is it, Wihwi? Why are you like that?”
“Wait, Kartak. Let me think for a moment.”
Kartak didn’t know what Argana had realized and waited quietly. He suspected these poisoning incidents were a prelude to something larger. It was more important than anything to resolve this before the problem grew.
But…
‘Would it be okay to tell Wihwi that the prince might be the target?’
After thinking the matter over, Kartak had a vague sense that the successive poisonings were targeting descendants of Khan Astran. Or rather, saying it like that made the most sense.
It didn’t seem like they were attempting to poison the princes or Argana directly. There was a subtler plot underneath that—something like this:
“They might be targeting Prince Yetekerid.”
Argana said it.
“Think about it, Kartak. I don’t know who the culprit is, but the aim could be to corner Yetekerid step by step like this. Until he can’t take it anymore….”
“But Wihwi, as you said, Prince Yetekerid is someone who’s hardly a threat—he’s almost nonexistent. Why bother with someone like that….”
“It’s not just Yetekerid. There’s someone they want to eliminate along with him.”
This incident… was creeping slowly toward the princes.
“By destabilizing the palace, a faction will surely appear who can use that as an excuse to say the royal family must step in to restore order.”
“So you mean… this is related to the crown prince issue?”
“That’s right. So the culprit will have to kill Yetekerid. They’ll have to silence him—if the two of them were accomplices.”
“If they aren’t accomplices?”
“Even if they aren’t, Yetekerid will still have to die. Because someone will need to be framed.”
Argana jumped to her feet.
Kartak also rose to follow, but grabbed her shoulder as she strode out.
“Argana, if what you say is true and this is a fight for the crown, then you—”
“Who do I think is the culprit? Isn’t it obvious?”
The only palaces whose people hadn’t been attacked were 예정궁 and 항춘궁—the palaces of Ayulsiran and Marata. That only the mothers of Ayur and Ishder had been spared in this frenzy of poisonings suggested much.
But in the next moment Argana stopped walking.
She had been almost certain it was Ishder’s doing, yet a sudden thought struck her that maybe it wasn’t.
‘If I were in that position…’
Argana thought.
‘If I were Ishder, I wouldn’t leave the maids of my mother’s palace alive. Of course I wouldn’t. I’d be suspected otherwise.’
