Chapter 29
The Price
Silence filled the study.
Tarahan accepted the letter Raid held out. On the luxurious paper was the sender’s name: Mikael La Piezzen—the crown prince of the Piezzen Empire.
It was the same sender as the letter that Zernom had previously delivered to Tarahan.
As he held this new letter, Tarahan recalled the words of the first one he had ignored:
Take good care of her. It would be pitiful if she died from loneliness.
Tarahan had scoffed at the prince’s concern for the former saintess. He had burned that earlier letter without a second thought, and this was the result.
“Was this your master’s order?”
“…Yes, it was,” Raid admitted with a bow.
The count was the prince’s man. This new letter read:
Since my dear friend isn’t exactly the delicate type, I suppose I have no choice but to help.
“A lunatic,” Tarahan muttered.
To think the crown prince would worry that his friend’s wife might die of loneliness—and then send a man to seduce her. A strangely considerate madman indeed.
This sort of “kindness” could only come from a mind far from normal.
Had it been simple malice, Tarahan might have understood. But the prince truly pitied Ninia and staged this outrageous scheme out of sympathy.
“If his mind were completely gone, he’d poison the empress or the emperor instead,” Tarahan clicked his tongue.
How someone like that played the empire’s “angel” and “saint of the royal family” was beyond comprehension.
Perhaps it ran in the family—that would at least make sense.
Even a family in shambles is better than Piezzen’s imperial household,
so the central nobles often whispered.
The emperor was obsessed with the goddess and the temple. Lavish donations from the imperial treasury were only the beginning.
He treated the high pontiff’s advice as an absolute command, and when he announced the construction of a massive temple on the empire’s golden plains, the nobles murmured that the pontiff, not the emperor, ruled the land.
And the empress?
A narcissist who loathed any man wielding greater power than herself—and in her conceit, she even regarded her own son, the crown prince, with horror.
She guarded her authority fiercely, could not bear the emperor’s interest in the prince, and treated her child with a coldness that chilled the rest of the imperial family.
Except for the emperor, every royal lived in fear of her tyranny.
“Tell him I’m no eunuch,” Tarahan said at last.
He ground the fallen letter under his heel. Raid lowered his head, silent, while a dark footprint stained the gilt-edged paper.
Is that all?
Raid swallowed hard, unsure. Tarahan tilted his neck with a stiff crack before asking another question.
“That woman—the one said to be the Marquis of Billian’s niece—where is she from?”
“Pardon?” Raid blinked, confused.
Tarahan gave a look of exasperation at the count’s loyalty without wit.
“She’s no noble. Nicely packaged, but still.”
Mierne looked the perfect lady, but small slips in dining etiquette and speech betrayed her crash-course training.
Such things might fool an etiquette tutor, but not Tarahan—he had walked that same path.
You never know when His Majesty will come for you. You must be ready to be recognized.
His mother had raised him alone, always waiting for the emperor to return.
They lived on a mountain slope above a rural village. Her skin was pale for a minority, but their origins still showed; wealth could not hide it, so they stayed apart.
She sold the trinkets the emperor left behind to raise him.
Her mind was fragile—sometimes rambling nonsense, sometimes obsessing until her eyes gleamed with mania.
I’ve brought a teacher to educate you. Learn well, she had said one ordinary day, bringing home a stern-faced man.
The man was a fallen noble, a debtor hiding in the countryside.
Though a scoundrel, he still knew the manners of nobility.
Tarahan learned aristocratic etiquette and speech through his beatings and kicks.
Thank you for teaching my son, his mother would say each time Tarahan mimicked a noble child, offering the man another piece of jewelry.
But the trinkets eventually ran out.
When nothing remained to pay him, she offered her own body as the fee.
Even when food ran out completely, Tarahan continued his lessons, arranging stones and sand on chipped plates to practice dining manners.
The first time the drunk man wrapped his hands around her neck in violence, Tarahan swung the woodcutter’s axe.
It was his first kill.
The emperor arrived when Tarahan was about ten.
He joyfully embraced the woman who rushed to him—and stabbed her to death before the boy’s eyes.
That day remained one of Tarahan’s deepest resentments.
“Marquis Billian introduced her suddenly. The empress permitted her to accompany us to the Danteor territory,” Raid explained, still clueless.
The naïve count seemed to believe without doubt that Mierne was truly the marquis’s niece.
That mad prince always did like the innocent ones, Tarahan thought, clicking his tongue at the gullible man.
Mikael enjoyed the company of obedient, gentle souls like the count.
Even when their own natures led them to blunders, he merely smiled as if it couldn’t be helped.
“Why else attach a woman to the delegation?”
Even before any central visitors arrived, news from Danteor would reach the empress’s ears.
Sending a woman disguised as a noble niece was clearly an attempt to tempt Tarahan.
A well-crafted doll indeed—but amusing when one saw through the empress’s ploy.
“I don’t care if a bed partner is noble or common. Her Majesty knows me far too little.”
Instead of sending a single doll, she might have done better to fill a carriage with flower-sellers.
Perhaps the lofty empress never imagined that.
Still, the empty-headed doll had been useful.
Plainly a commoner, Mierne clung to Tarahan desperately, unwilling to return to whatever past she had left behind.
Tarahan pretended not to listen, letting her chatter until she revealed bits of information about the marquis.
The marquis seems very interested in the aqueduct Your Excellency is building…
Danteor’s chief problem was food supply: the land saw only one brief summer each year.
For now, imperial permission allowed imports from neighboring regions, but that could end anytime.
The aqueduct project was preparation for that day—a plan to cultivate crops underground, where it stayed warm and plants could grow with little light.
Best to drive them off quickly, Tarahan thought.
A “site inspection” might soon cause trouble, and the clinging woman was overdue for dismissal.
While considering his next steps, Tarahan turned to Raid.
“Oh—one more thing.”
As if suddenly remembering, he drew his sword.
The well-honed blade flashed toward Raid’s right wrist.
Thunk.
Blood spurted as the severed hand thudded to the floor.
Raid collapsed to his knees in the growing red puddle, too shocked even to scream.
“If this truly wasn’t your idea, I’ll leave it at that. Take the hand and deliver it to your master.”
A servant willing to lose his own hand for his master’s order—and to present it to him without complaint—was indeed a loyal dog.
Tarahan wondered if Mikael kept such blindly devoted people nearby just to witness such spectacles.
“…Thank you,” Raid whispered, swallowing his cries of pain.
It was hardly a sight worth watching.
Tarahan rang for a servant.
The man entered, paling at the blood and the severed hand.
“See to him,” Tarahan ordered with a jerk of his chin.
Fearing for his own neck, the servant hastily helped the count and fled.
All the castle staff were trained in emergency care.
Though no priest could reattach the hand, the count would not bleed to death.
Tarahan considered that mercy enough. His answer to the letter was delivered.
Surely his only friend would now lose interest in Tarahan’s wife.
After other servants scrubbed away the blood, the study looked as if nothing had happened.
Still smelling faintly of iron, Tarahan left the room.
When he reached his bedchamber, the bed was empty.
