TLFR 02

Chapter 2

“I’m not sure what you mean, Your Highness.”

The Grand Duke’s face was like a lake on a still night, without even a single small breeze stirring. It was a face that made people impatient.

“Please speak comfortably. I mean that earlier story about the royal of Genear. When you said you would love her as a person…”

Edgar waited for the Grand Duke’s answer with a somewhat uneasy feeling.

The answer that came after a moment was not much different from his expectations.

“Does it matter whether it’s sincere or not?”

The Grand Duke tilted his head after seeing Edgar’s stiffened expression.

“I thought you’d be pleased. Edgar.”

“Surely you didn’t actually want to take that woman as crown princess. And you weren’t thinking of risking another war, were you?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Edgar let out a sigh at his cousin’s face, which seemed drained of emotion.

The crown prince of Lezan and the Grand Duke of Eleanor. They had been raised in the same cradle since before they were weaned. When no eyes were watching, they used comfortable forms of address and speech as they did now.

That was how close they were. Which was why it was not difficult to guess the thoughts the Grand Duke had not voiced aloud.

It was a lie. Not sincere.

Treat a bastard as a human being? That could never be possible. Rayeon Eleanor was a man who by nature could not tolerate bastards.

At least not since he had witnessed his parents’ limbs hacked to pieces, dangling from the duchy’s castle walls.

For such a man to voluntarily declare he would take a royal of Genear as Grand Duchess. From that moment, that royal’s fate was as good as decided.

Moreover, to Rayeon Eleanor, marriage was nothing more than a political tool. Even if that royal had not been a bastard, drawing the emotion called love from him would have been close to impossible.

Edgar chose his words for a while.

“…Would it not be better to use another method? Isn’t the method you mentioned too cruel to her? If that’s not mockery, then what…”

“Edgar. You seem overly generous to a woman who might be a spy from an enemy nation.”

He could not argue even against that. Edgar pressed his lips firmly together, and the Grand Duke rose from his seat. He seemed about to leave with his back to him, but instead circled the table toward the wall.

“Mockery. That’s not wrong. Then what would be a better method…”

Beneath the wall was a carelessly leaned portrait. It was a portrait painted without much care.

The woman in the painting had black hair flowing down to her lower back and blue eyes.

Her gaze was delicate, her cheeks lacked vitality, and her body was excessively thin.

A face that could be counted among beauties if one were generous—but only just that much, when there were more than enough women more beautiful than her.

Rayeon, not taking his eyes off the woman, quietly let out.

“Then should I drag her down to the imperial palace’s underground?”

“Pardon?”

“I’m asking whether I should torture her.”

It was a voice carrying not a single grain of emotion.

“Break her bones, cut away her flesh, deny her sleep for days on end. Should I force her heart to turn that way.”

“Certainly not a bad method. But why bother. There’s a more efficient way. It would be better for this woman too.”

“Being a bastard is enough. I don’t want to make her a cripple as well and put her in the Grand Duchess’s seat.”

Edgar had nothing more to say and shut his mouth. There was not a single thing wrong with Rayeon’s words.

In the end, this was for the best. He muttered in a choked voice toward his cousin, who had turned away completely.

“She’s a child I saw once in Genear eight years ago, hyungnim.”

“It was when I attended the masquerade ball held at the imperial palace.”

An old memory was dragged up. A pair of large eyes and a small voice brushed through Rayeon’s mind.

<What is the name of the gentleman in the white mask?>

“…Well. I don’t know.”

But that was all. He did not remember things without value.

But Edgar seemed different.

“I remember her as an innocent and lovely child. Please treat her well. That child is also merely one of the victims Genear has produced.”

Rayeon smiled faintly at that cheeky remark.

“What are you worried about, Edgar. That I might abuse the woman?”

“Apparently I look like that much of an emotional person in your eyes.”

Edgar fell silent. Certainly, Rayeon Eleanor was far from the type to be swept up by emotion.

“I don’t care. Whether that woman is a bastard or not. Whatever kind of person she is.”

Rather, he was closer to the type whose human emotions had dried up and cracked apart.

Rayeon met eyes with the woman in the painting.

“As long as she quietly, knowing her place, stays as if she’s there and not there… in a few years she might be able to leave the duchy unharmed.”

An optical illusion arose as if the woman’s blue eyes were trembling uneasily.

As he indifferently lowered his gaze, he saw a name written in elegant brushstrokes at the bottom of the portrait.

‘Ines.’

It was the name of the woman who would become his wife and the Grand Duchess of the Eleanor duchy.

Thud.

A small body shoved by a rough hand rolled across the dirt floor.

Coarse soil tangled in her frizzy black hair that had grown to her lower back. The woman of slender build staggered to her feet.

“You mustn’t be clumsy in Lezan either, Ines. You remember properly what you were taught?”

“…Yes.”

The soldier who had pulled Ines from the cage and thrown her to the ground looked down at her with disgusted eyes.

‘What a nasty piece of work.’

During the fortnight it took to travel from Genear to Lezan’s capital, she had not been able to wash, let alone eat and sleep properly.

She was now an adult, but she was a frail woman, skin and bones, looking younger than her years. There was no way she could have endured the soldiers’ forced march.

Yet Ines did not cry, nor even groan. No, he had not seen her breath quicken even once. Even when her body was thrown onto the stone floor with rough force, there was not a single small scratch on her.

Seeing this, the rumor that she had been born carrying the seed of strange misfortune felt like the truth.

The soldier’s tone grew rough.

“Lucifer will hand you over to Lezan. Last of all, recite what His Majesty commanded.”

“‘Go to Lezan. Go and take the most noble one as your husband, and make them acknowledge their own worthlessness before the entire continent.’ That is what he said.”

Her blue eyes were unfocused. The bastard who had only ever had gentle, kind eyes no matter how she was trampled had distinctly lost her vitality since being dragged to Lezan.

“Good. Now follow Lucifer. Hurry!”

Ines staggered forward under that harsh grip. Thin black smoke leaked faintly from beneath her shabby sleeve. Along with a small whisper.

[Are you okay?]

“Yeah… thanks to you. Thank you, Kian.”

The black smoke that had been softly curling around Ines’s body seemed unable to be reassured by those words, and circled around her shoulders and chest for a long while.

[I want to kill them all. Ines, it hurt so much.]

“Kill them… you know that’s not allowed. Are you trying to kill me too while you’re at it?”

Ines let out a hollow laugh. Kian, who clung to her heart, was her only ally and at the same time the chief culprit slowly killing her. Because he lived by sucking the life force of his host.

Still, there was no one else who worried about her and protected her. Ines whispered weakly toward the mist that had settled on her palm.

“I’m really fine, so go in quickly. Someone might see and get suspicious.”

[…Understood.]

The black mist reluctantly seeped into her left chest. Her fragile heart dropped with a thud, then began to beat somewhat irregularly.

Ines caught her breath and looked around.

She had come all the way to Lezan in the end.

The imperial palace of the enemy nation Lezan was less splendid compared to Genear’s golden palace, but it had a far more elegant and classical charm.

The dignity of a thousand-year empire that Genear could never imitate no matter how it tried lingered throughout the palace.

But in this beautiful imperial palace, there were only two places for Ines to go.

First, she would be locked in a prison, and a few days later she would be summoned to the largest and most dazzling hall in the palace.

There she would declare that she would take the crown prince as her husband.

‘And after that…’

After that, she didn’t know.

Ines followed behind Lucifer and thought self-deprecatingly.

What Genear had commanded of her was not merely to choose a spouse. For the first time in her life, she had been dragged into a splendid room and taught many things. Most of them were things she had not wanted to know.

In Ines’s life, there was nothing she could choose of her own will. It had always been that way, so there was nothing new about it, but…

The words her grandfather, Genear’s old emperor, had spat out circled her ears like an auditory hallucination.

<Men are all like that. Before a skilled woman, they are helpless.>

<Blind the man’s eyes. Transplant the seed of darkness you carry into his nation. Give birth to an heir born under misfortune, Ines. Let them rot from the inside.>

That said, it wasn’t as if she wanted to endure even such things.

Seduce a man, give birth to an unwanted child, destroy a nation…

Tears she had held back filled her blue eyes. No matter how much she blinked, her vision, covered in despair, was only dark.

‘…Should I just run away.’

Ines desperately groped beyond the castle walls with her gaze. If she borrowed Kian’s power, it was not impossible.

If she shaved off about ten years of her lifespan, couldn’t she run away to a place where no one knew her… But the lifespan already shaved off over the course of her life would easily amount to that much.

So she could not know when or how she would die.

Then wouldn’t it be better to live freely for whatever time remained…

While she was lost in distant worries, Lucifer handed Ines over to a Lezan imperial knight.

“Is this the one? The one sent from Genear.”

A knight clad in armor lined with gold brocade abruptly seized both her cheeks with one hand. Ines woke from her thoughts in surprise.

The knight forcibly turned her head side to side and spoke with contempt.

“Filthy. Unclean. Did they send her like this on purpose?”

“Knight of Lezan. Watch your words. She is the one who will rise to the most precious position in this nation.”

Lucifer responded in a tone laced with mockery. The Lezan knight dropped Ines as if flinging her away, along with a curse.

“Ah…!”

Her slender body staggered for a moment. Just as the sharply rising black smoke was about to support her body—

Someone caught Ines from behind.