Chapter 30

"M-Mommy!"

"Iberin!"

"Mistress! P-please calm down! Slow, slow breaths!"

The physician rushed over and steadied her, hurrying to keep her calm.

Iberin followed his lead, breathing in and out, settling herself before asking again.

"Why was it canceled?"

"…This is my fault."

Lyssel bowed his head as if he didn't have a single excuse to offer.

"So what exactly did you do."

If she heard him out and it turned out the trial had been canceled over nothing, she wasn't going to let it stand.

Iberin gritted her teeth and braced herself.

But Lyssel couldn't seem to get the words out, so the butler stepped in.

"After the mistress collapsed, His Highness went to the temple to ask for help."

"What?"

Iberin's eyes flew wide in shock—and then it clicked.

Rotte had said back then that holy power could extend her life.

Iberin's gaze drifted to Lyssel of its own accord.

He must have been so worried about her after she collapsed that he'd gone all the way to the temple.

He'd known there was no chance they'd help, but maybe he'd been grasping at straws.

"They turned him away at the door, and His Highness used his power on them."

"His power?"

"Yes. Holy power and demonic energy are opposites. He said he poured demonic energy into them. Thanks to that… for a brief time, they would've thought their holy power had been corrupted."

"…Ah. So that's it."

"Yes. Because of that, he had to go before His Majesty."

There was no way Lyssel could handle the fox-like emperor.

Iberin could picture the meeting between the two of them clearly without ever having seen it.

"Did he threaten you?"

"…It was half a threat."

Lyssel answered, resigned.

"I ruined everything. I'm sorry."

"Even so, His Highness didn't cause trouble for no reason! The temple was the first to throw salt at him and dump water on him!"

The butler shouted it in front of Lyssel, who was apologizing in silence.

At that, Iberin's face crumpled.

She was about to flare up again, but the physician at her side caught her and calmed her down.

She couldn't even get angry properly.

Anyway, Iberin swallowed dryly, let out a breath, closed her eyes for a long beat, and opened them.

"If the temple was that out of line, you shouldn't have put up with it. They should've been half-killed for it. What the Grand Duke did wasn't nearly enough."

"I knew you'd say that."

The butler smiled.

But even so, this was the matter of threatening priests in a holy nation.

"Anyway, was that all? The trial getting canceled? Tell me there wasn't anything else gouged out of you."

Iberin knew there was no way the emperor would let this slide.

However much the temple had been in the wrong, the emperor would've twisted things any way he could to pin the blame on Lyssel.

She was worried Lyssel might have walked right into it.

"…I ruined everything. Aren't you angry about that?"

"Forget it. It's already done. And honestly, I'd have been angrier if you'd put up with it. Lecashe isn't powerless—it's a Grand Duke's house, for god's sake. What reason do we have to take that lying down?"

"…Ah."

"You did good."

The old Lyssel wouldn't have gone to the temple in the first place, and even if he had, he'd have swallowed it whole and come back.

Iberin knew.

She knew she was at the root of why Lyssel hadn't put up with it.

So she wasn't angry at all.

What pissed her off more was the emperor leveraging the temple incident—which had happened while she was unconscious and ill—to threaten Lyssel.

The emperor knew perfectly well why Lyssel had gone that far, and he'd used the situation anyway.

"Ha…"

"Why are you smiling? I asked if the emperor pulled anything else."

"It just hits me that what you really want is Lecashe's happiness."

"You doubted me?"

"It's not that, but it's still surprising."

"There's a lot of surprising things around here."

"You're probably the only person who'd say it that way to me. And nothing else happened with the emperor."

"Really?"

"…There was something, though."

"What."

The second Iberin's voice spiked, the physician grabbed her arm and shot her a warning look.

In, out. In, out.

Iberin breathed like a machine and asked,

"There was something?"

"Well, yes. But I turned down every proposal that I thought you wouldn't like."

"What did he propose?"

"It's a bit of a long explanation, but I think the emperor might've actually raised his guard against Lecashe…"

{"What did you do? Tell me everything, every word."}(#lwemckunrqax)

"Yes…"

The butler, who already knew the whole story, was smiling contentedly.

It was the look of a man watching his own well-raised child.

---

The conversation that day had gone like this.

Forced into the palace by the half-threat, Lyssel walked in to find the emperor already wearing a face full of reprimand.

But Lyssel didn't so much as blink as he met the emperor's gaze—he simply gave the proper greeting.

"Lyssel Lecashe."

"Hah. You actually have the nerve to greet me?"

"……."

In the face of the emperor coming in hard from the start, Lyssel kept his mouth firmly shut.

"Pouring demonic energy into a priest! Priests are beings of holy power who safeguard our nation! And the high priest, no less? Hah."

The emperor rattled off Lyssel's offenses, but Lyssel's mouth didn't open.

He clearly wanted to hear I was wrong—an apology—but Lyssel had no intention of giving him one.

"What would you have me do?"

"…The temple is in an uproar, and what would I have you do is all you've got? Is that the extent of what you have to say?"

When Lyssel refused to move the way he wanted, the emperor seemed thrown, but tried once more to steer the conversation toward an admission of wrongdoing.

"That's all."

"…Honestly."

"Your Majesty. If you have something to say, please come out with it. I'm no good at speaking in circles."

A fastball.

The emperor stared at Lyssel for a long beat, then let out a hollow laugh.

"Quite shameless. The temple wants an apology from you, and an appropriate punishment."

"I have no intention of doing that."

"What?"

"I did nothing wrong."

"……Grand Duke!"

"Why is Your Majesty only seeing the temple's losses? I'm a victim in my own right. I went to the only place that could heal my wife and made the request politely. The temple was the one that mistreated me first."

"So you refuse to apologize."

"I refuse."

"Then are you going to push through with the trial as well."

"……If Your Majesty holds the temple back, I'll give up on the trial. Beyond that, I won't give up on anything."

The threatening letter the emperor had sent.

In it had been a line about stripping Iberin of her position as Grand Duchess.

It was, frankly, a nonsensical move, but Aleta was a nation where imperial authority was absolute.

And the cursed Lecashe at that—

Whatever story the imperial family wanted to invent about him, they could bend things to fit.

There was no choice.

Of course, if Lyssel had refused to keep guarding the Forest of the World Tree and stuck his neck out, the emperor would've been the one panicking, but the hypnosis and conditioning someone had laid on him long ago were complete.

Abandoning the Forest of the World Tree—the thing he believed was his duty to guard—couldn't even function as a threat for him.

So the emperor's victory had been preordained.

"Fine. If you cancel the trial, I'll hold the temple back. In exchange, there has to be a price, doesn't there?"

"A price?"

"You lose nothing."

"I'll hear it out before deciding. But I'll refuse any proposal that I think Iberin wouldn't like."

"…What in the."

"Exactly what I said."

"If your wife told you to die, would you die?"

The emperor asked back, baffled.

{"That'd never happen, but if she did, I would."}(#dsbvsy5x1w01)

"You're out of your mind."

"This is being out of one's mind? Then yes, I must be out of my mind."

The emperor, apparently at a loss for words, kept letting out small disbelieving laughs as he tried out various demands.

He'd originally been planning to extract a single open-ended favor he could call in whenever he wanted, but with Lyssel looking ready to refuse that outright, he'd compromised.

Yet every single thing he proposed got shot down.

This one wouldn't work because of this. That one wouldn't work because of that.

But listening carefully, the ultimate reason was always because Iberin wouldn't like it.

"What does your wife like?"

When the emperor, out of patience, asked it, Lyssel smiled.

The emperor, seeing Lyssel smile for the first time, blinked in surprise, but Lyssel didn't seem to realize he was smiling.

"She told me she wants Lecashe's happiness. And Your Majesty, Lecashe is already devoting itself to the empire. Picking at us over something like this is, frankly, not right."

A perfect final blow.

{The emperor was so stunned his mouth dropped open.}(#g7poowgv757v)

---

Lyssel recited the whole thing exactly as Iberin had asked—not missing a word.

Iberin had been listening seriously at first, but partway through she started giggling, and by the end she'd cracked up completely.

Of course, the physician's eyes kept emphasizing calm, please stay calm, so she had to muffle her laughs into small pfft sounds.

By the time the story ended, Iberin felt like something heavy had lifted off her chest.

"Magnificent!"

She gave him a big thumbs-up and beamed.

"Did I do well?"

"Yes. You knocked it out of the park. I really want to know what the emperor's face looked like."

She hadn't dreamed Lyssel would go that far.

She'd figured he'd ended up roughly compromising with the emperor, but he'd taken him to the cleaners properly.

The fact that Lecashe of all people had done that—just like Lyssel said, the emperor would be feeling uneasy now.

"There may be retaliation."

"You'll protect me, won't you?"

"…Of course."

Iberin lifted herself up slightly from the bed and ran her hand over Lyssel's head, ruffling his hair.

His eyes widened a fraction, then softened into a slow smile.

"…Huh?"

It was the first time she'd seen Lyssel smile head-on like that, and Iberin paused for a moment.

"You smile a lot lately."

"I smiled?"

"Yes. You're smiling right now. I said this before, that you'd smiled, and you still don't realize when you're doing it?"

"Yes. I didn't know."

"When you smile, the corners of your mouth go up and your facial muscles move."

"Is that right. Now that you say it, I can tell. But when I smile, does it look natural like yours does?"

He apparently had so few occasions to smile that the fact that he'd done it seemed strange to him.

"I don't know what natural like mine means, but it's normal."

The handsomeness wasn't normal, granted.

"My smile is normal."

"That's right."

"There's something about me that's normal."

And with that, Lyssel really did break into a bright, full smile.

In that instant, Iberin found herself raising a hand and covering her eyes without realizing.