The Knight Leaves the Stage (2)
A fortnight had already passed since the incident the world had begun to call by those names.
The kingdom, meanwhile...
"Execute King Edmund!"
Execute him! Execute him!
"Give us the head of the traitor who betrayed the kingdom!"
Give us the traitor's head!!!
Far from settling, the chaos only swelled, and it swelled overwhelmingly. At some point the people of the kingdom had risen in protest. Soldiers were sent out more than once to put a stop to it, but the moment the troops appeared the demonstrators scattered, and because they wore black clothes and masks from start to finish, even picking out a single face was nearly impossible. Other commoners helped them, too, some openly and some not, so the soldiers' investigation never advanced a step.
In short, the whole commotion said one thing.
"The people already know the whole truth. I'd wager the information guild scattered it everywhere. Only the old men of the Noble Council were left looking like fools. They leaned on the newspapers, whipped up agitation, fabricated what they pleased—and none of it did a thing."
"Right..."
"Your name is spreading with it. There are even people calling you the noble Knight in White, or the Fist Star, for the way you clenched a fist and charged straight at absolute power. Hehe."
"That is so childish."
"Childish or not, it's popular."
"...Don't tell me that chibi doll is me turned into merchandise."
"I invested in the making of it. It sells rather well. Hehe."
"...The bear does the tricks, and the trainer takes the applause..."
Lee Han's eye twitched as he stared at the doll, which was infuriatingly well made. The quality was no joke. He had no idea whose design it was, but truly...
"For the record, the young lady of Tristan made it. A talented child."
"...So it was our kid's work."
In any case, one look at the thing was enough to see that the Noble Council's schemes had ended in a farce. From the Council's side, it must have been beyond belief. They had meant to spend every coin, every scrap of power, and every thread of information they possessed to blur what King Edmund had done—and the whole sordid effort had collapsed not in a month, but in a fortnight.
And yet that was only natural.
"Those incompetents are still living in the past. It has been more than a hundred years since the commoners were ignorant."
One of the Military God's greatest achievements had been nothing other than education. He had built schools so that even the lowest classes could read and manage basic figures, and he had extended learning to anyone who wanted it. He had gone further and raised libraries that anyone might use, so that whoever wished to learn could simply open a book. Thanks to those benefits, it was no exaggeration to say that Pendragon's illiteracy stood worlds apart from what it had been a century before. The mere fact that commoners could fight their way through the Royal Academy's brutal examinations showed that the gap between noble and commoner was no longer what it once had been.
True, one still could not claim that no field remained the nobility's private preserve. What mattered now was simpler. The people were not ignorant, and they were no longer creatures who could be fooled as easily as in the old days.
Especially—
"The ones who suffered most from the string of recent disasters were none other than the powerless commoners."
The nobles had come through largely unscathed. It was the commoners who had lost property to the stirring of the Blood Cross Army. Whenever the merchant companies and the nobles joined hands and drove prices to murderous heights, those people were left clutching the backs of their necks. Even in a bumper year, the ones who already had everything took it all, and children starved. The irony had happened more than once.
"And then the temple they thought stood with them stabbed them in the back, and now the royal house has done the same.... Honestly, beating the king is something they can only shrug at by this point. What matters to them now is revenge. They mean to pay back, somehow, the betrayal they felt."
So the present unrest was not strange at all. If anything, it felt overdue. Fairer to say they had endured until now, and that this affair in the royal house had been the spark.
"Hm. I see."
"Just so."
"...But listen."
"Mm?"
"Do I actually need to know any of that? And while I'm—"
Crunch.
"—eating?"
"......"
"I'd like to eat in peace, so would you mind stepping out?"
"...Mmm."
Isis watched him with a faintly complicated look as he carved steak behind the iron bars and put away five lobsters. For the record, yogurt ice cream was waiting as dessert.
"So. First visit in a fortnight, and you open by lecturing me on the state of the nation. Why?"
Only after he had leisurely finished even the dessert did Lee Han turn to conversation, and at the sight of it Isis clicked her tongue.
"Impudent brat."
"Well, if you've nothing left to say, you can go. It's time for bodyweight work."
"......"
"I'll do my work. Sister, say whatever you feel like saying."
"...Hah."
At last Lee Han set into push-ups with deadly seriousness. For him it ought to have been nothing—an easy exercise—and yet he looked as if the fate of the world hung on every repetition.
Crack.
Intent held live through every motion. The load was monstrous—enough that even weight training under a crushing burden would have had to yield a step.
He knocked out a casual hundred push-ups and more, shifting the width of his hands again and again so the strain chased a new place in the muscle, then went to a handstand, to a single arm, to his fingertips alone. Posture after posture, until the whole display looked like a circus act.
"......"
Reduced to an audience for something like gymnastics inside a cell scarcely thirty-six square feet, Isis watched him closely. She stayed that way for a long while. Then she spoke.
"Edmund has woken."
Once again, she recited the present state of things.
"Huff! Hah!"
"The man who woke is not normal. They are attempting treatment through Holy Law, but he still cannot speak properly, and the damage to his ears and eyes makes even standing difficult. The moment he rises, his head spins, and fainting outright is the usual result."
"Because I drove my strength into him. Huff!"
"Yes. Because of that, he is no longer a body that can stand upon any official stage."
"What a... pity... that is!"
"...You do not look as if you think so in the least."
Lee Han, however, seemed to have no interest at all in what Isis was saying. This was Edmund, a man who was in truth no different from his enemy. Had this business, perhaps, cleared the old grudge for good?
"It hasn't."
Drip. Drip.
Sweat beading on him, he answered with flat finality. The exercise did not stop.
"I am never going to forgive that man. I don't know about other things, but I hold a grudge for a very long time. As long as he's alive, I'll keep tormenting him. One way or another."
"...I see."
"I just don't have time to waste on him. He's only a small fry anyway."
Yes. Attention spent on a man like that was time thrown away. Training like this was far more rewarding, a far better use of the hours. Why sit around burning on a grudge for nothing? Whenever the thought happened to surface, he could simply go and torment him. That was enough.
"...An absurd thing to say."
"Call it efficient. So. Is that all you came to tell me?"
With a harsh breath, Lee Han finished something like three thousand push-ups and moved on to squats, varying his stance without pause.
"If that's all it was, why did you come?"
"Are you scolding me?"
"Not scolding. I just can't picture you wasting time like this."
"......"
Had she truly come all this way only to say so little—and she, of all people? The reply was tangled with doubt, and Isis smiled bitterly.
"Do you think me so heartless as that?"
"You are. I know you."
A woman who did not spend time on futile things. A woman who raised countless people to be her hands and feet, if it brought her even a little closer to her purpose. That was Princess Isis, and that was the woman Lee Han knew. So he was certain she had come to this cell because she had some aim.
If he guessed—
"Did your father catch on? That the one who exposed every last one of his crimes was his own daughter?"
"......"
"Or were you threatened? That he would finally cough up your 'weakness'?"
"...I have not been threatened. Not yet. Fortunately, he knows it as well. If he spreads my weakness through the world, the only shield still protecting him vanishes with it."
"Hm."
"For this much, I am grateful. That you did not kill him. Had you killed him, my weakness would have come out one way or another."
"Sure."
Even her thanks, Lee Han let pass as a matter of course. Rather—
"...So. Is that the end of it?"
"......"
"I don't see a man that petty, with an inferiority complex that enormous, stopping at only that."
"......"
"Yeah. I knew it."
"...Hah. Why are you so quick to notice."
"I hear that a lot."
Lee Han snorted a laugh. Isis did not. She could not. What she was about to say was not something she wanted to say at all.
Even so...
"Lee Han. My sworn younger brother."
"Say it."
"...The Noble Council, King Edmund, the merchants' union, and a host of other bodies have decided your punishment."
"Oh?"
"You are to be..."
Lee Han is hereby banished from the kingdom.
The look on the princess's face as the words left her was wretched beyond description, as if none of it were her will.
On the other side of the bars, however...
The man who had longed for nothing more than to resign shed tears of pure gratitude.