Chapter : 40
Butterfly’s Natural Enemy (5)
Only the sound of the campfire crackling could be heard.
Two men sitting together late at night without even a drink—and worse, as enemies traveling together—what could there really be to talk about?
Yeonho leaned his back against a tree, folded his arms, and closed his eyes.
“Is it really fine to sleep without tying me up?” Jangho asked.
Yeonho opened his eyes and replied,
“Our destination is the same anyway. If you run, I’ll just chase you down.”
“You don’t even consider the possibility that I’m pretending to limp on purpose to make you let your guard down?”
“Even if you were perfectly fine, catching one bastard like you wouldn’t be a problem. So stop worrying about pointless things and just sleep. If you’re slow again tomorrow, I’ll tie you up and drag you along.”
“Once you find the princess, will you really withdraw your troops?”
“A war needs a clear objective. The objective of this war is rescuing the princess, not territorial expansion. Does putting it that way ease your sense of guilt a little?”
“Guilt…? Well. To be honest, seeing you rampage like this is actually quite satisfying. It feels like those responsible will finally pay the price. Still, I do feel a bit sorry for the innocent bugs you mentioned earlier—the ones who’ll get trampled to death for no reason.”
“You should feel sorry. Anyone should be guilty before the people who meet tragedy because of incompetent leaders. But they are not my people, so don’t appeal to me for sympathy.”
“Caught me?”
“If you want your people to get hurt even a little less, then starting tomorrow, move faster. The sooner we get the princess out, the fewer of your people will die.”
At Yeonho’s cold advice, Jangho gave a bitter smile and lowered his head.
They had been walking together for several days, yet they had barely exchanged a few words.
Perhaps because they were nearing Magoseong, tonight felt strangely calming, making him want to talk about anything.
As they exchanged words a few times, an odd sense of closeness began to form.
“There’s actually a real reason I tried to poison Bisanseong,” Jangho said.
“I’m not particularly curious,” Yeonho replied.
Yeonho closed his eyes again, even frowning slightly.
“We didn’t care much whether you lived or died. Our true objective was to kill the princess.”
“What?”
Despite claiming he wasn’t curious, Yeonho’s eyes snapped open, and his folded arms loosened.
“You were simply in the way of killing the princess. Of course, it would’ve been even better if we’d killed you along with her.”
Yeonho had already suspected that the empress might be behind what happened back then.
He had desperately hoped that wasn’t the case, but hearing the truth directly from an enemy’s mouth left him devastated.
“Are you disappointed? Because the life of a future princess-consort was worth more than the life of a general guarding Bisanseong?”
“Of course Her Highness the Princess is far more precious than I am. I’m just curious why you were so obsessed with killing her. Once you reached Bisanseong, wouldn’t it have been enough to just kill me?”
That was something he genuinely couldn’t understand.
The empress’s goal was his downfall. If he died, that alone would have served her purpose.
There was no need to kill the princess and pin the blame on him.
“What we were commissioned to do was kill the princess. The ones who attacked the princess’s carriage were also Nonam soldiers.”
“Hah.”
He had thought those were assassins sent by the empress, but to think armed Nonam soldiers had freely roamed Bisanseong—it was absurd.
As if reading his thoughts, Jangho spoke in a consoling tone.
“It’s not your fault. The empress cleared the way for us.”
“This is outrageous! She opened the border just to kill the princess?!”
Yeonho flared up in anger.
“If we’re being precise, it was to drive out the ruler.”
“Why! Why must the princess die just to kill me?”
“So that you’d be remembered as an incompetent general who couldn’t even protect the princess. And the empress plans to send her own son to Bisanseong.”
“What?”
“Instead of the incompetent criminal Kang Yeonho recommended by the crown prince, the empress will send her son as the ruler of Bisanseong. And the imperial prince will display great valor, pushing the Nonam tribe far back from the border.”
Hearing all this, Yeonho let out a scoffing laugh, unable to believe it.
“That’s nonsense. It’s hard to believe the empress would go that far, and the imperial prince isn’t capable of something like that.”
“I know. It’ll only be temporary—Nonam has agreed to play along for a while. For us, having the imperial prince guarding Bisanseong is a huge advantage.”
“Hah! So the king of Nonam knows how to play such sly games. Or rather… did he accept the empress’s proposal?”
“My father is old now—he’s no longer the heroic figure he once was. And in this matter, the influence of my first and second elder brothers was strong. My father has already become a king who founded a nation, so he wants to avoid a major war if possible.”
After hearing too much, Yeonho shook his head and fell into thought.
If Jangho’s words were true, the princess had been kidnapped to exchange her for Nonam’s captured son.
In that process, the princess was meant to die no matter what.
They probably hadn’t expected him to move first and attempt a rescue.
Since they couldn’t just give up a princess they’d barely managed to capture, they would extract Jangho somehow and kill the princess instead.
Yulbok had called him reckless and tried to stop him, but in the end, it turned out to be the right choice.
‘But killing the princess would bring greater benefit than rescuing a son who was driven into a corner. Would they really take such a risk by kidnapping her?’
As that thought occurred to him, Yeonho began to suspect that Jangho might be deceiving him.
“I almost believed you. No matter how I think about it, if you intended to kill the princess, you wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of kidnapping her.”
“Whether you believe me or not is up to you. What you think doesn’t matter. But I’m not the only one with enemies. The situation in Nonam is just as complicated as it is in Yeongseong.”
Hearing even that, his words didn’t sound like a lie.
“I only told you because I never want us to meet like this again. Let’s meet on the battlefield instead. I’m tired of assassinations too—so you deal with your country’s empress.”
“Deal with the empress? Then will you deal with your father?”
“I said ‘deal with,’ but that wording does sound a bit harsh.”
With that, their conversation ended, and the two men fell back into silence, lost in their own thoughts.
Yeonho mulled over Jangho’s words, trying to organize them.
If what he said was true, the princess had been sacrificed in many ways because of him.
By the crown prince, by him, and by the empress’s schemes.
Had she stayed with her fiancé, she would never have suffered such a calamity.
‘To bring someone raised so preciously here only to make her suffer like this… it’s my fault.’
For the first time, he wondered if it might be better to send her away—just as the princess herself wished.
“By the way, about the princess,” Jangho said.
Yeonho had been thinking about her, and the mention of her cut his thoughts short.
“How did the princess know that the liquor I brought was poisoned?”
“She said she was just guessing.”
“She has good intuition? How could she act with such confidence based on nothing but a guess?”
“……”
Yeonho himself had thought it was a bit too coincidental, but he accepted that she’d simply acted cautiously due to a bad feeling.
“Did she really say nothing else?”
“What kind of answer are you hoping to hear?”
“No, it’s nothing in particular. It’s just… an old story I heard as a child.”
“An old story?”
“It might sound ridiculous, but my mother once told me something like this. Long ago, there was a family in Yeongseong whose members possessed a divine ability to see ‘energy.’ With that, they could detect poison and distinguish treasures. They supposedly became immensely wealthy because of that power.”
“That’s a truly childish story.”
“Well, it was something I heard as a child.”
“Don’t tell me you actually believed it?”
“My mother was from Yeongseong.”
At that unexpected statement, Yeonho was slightly surprised.
“…So that’s why you speak Yeongseong’s language so well.”
“My mother missed her homeland, so she told those stories often. Sometimes I wondered if such people might really exist in Yeongseong.”
“They don’t. It’s just a fairy tale.”
Yeonho replied coldly to Jangho, who was reminiscing about his Yeongseong-born mother.
Then he added,
“Still, if the princess truly had such an ability—like in those old stories—that would be nice.”
Because then, that divine power might protect her.
