The Meal Scattered on the Ground
After pressing the prescription and the gold nuggets into the hands of Choi Ja-myeong, who was standing there at a loss, I pointed at the door.
"Now go on."
"……Your Highness, I……"
"That's enough. I'm going to read, so don't disturb me—out you go."
When I waved my hand, Choi Ja-myeong looked down at the prescription and spoke with glistening eyes. "Your Highness, I will never, ever forget this kindness."
"It's not my kindness—it's your good fortune, remember? Are you really going to disobey me when I tell you to leave?"
"N-no, of course not."
At my frown, Choi Ja-myeong sprang up and bustled toward the door. She stopped at the threshold, turned back, bowed deeply to me, and finally left the room.
Now I can finally read.
I opened the book, but the words refused to register. Choi Ja-myeong's face, tearfully thanking me only moments ago, kept flickering before my eyes.
Sohwa's face as she saw me off. The Crown Prince's face going blank at my suggestion to practice together. Seol Deunghwa's face when she promised to avenge me. One after another they surfaced, unbidden.
Something's fluttering and stirring in my chest. A strange feeling……
It was unfamiliar, but by no means unpleasant. What should I even call it? Joy? Pride? Delight?
Was it because, for the first time, I had helped someone with my own strength?
It felt as though some small, glittering star were softly glowing deep inside my chest……
……I should look into whether the other court ladies are going through hardships of their own. And I need to adapt quickly to my role as Crown Princess so I can properly help him, too……
Only after making that resolve did the words finally come into focus.
I went carefully through the roster of palace attendants, then reached for the legal codes and state records that Court Lady Kim and the maids had left stacked for me.
"Your Highness?"
Hours had slipped by unnoticed before Ansi's voice reached me—she'd returned from her errand at last.
"Oh, you're back?"
When I lifted my head, Ansi slipped in through the window, folding her wings, and stared at me as though I made no sense at all. "Did Your Highness not descend to the mortal realm precisely so that you, unburdened by illness, could do everything your heart desired?"
"I did. Why?"
"Then why are you…… studying?"
"Because I wanted to."
"Yesss……? Studying? Did Your Highness not mean that you intended to frolic to your heart's content?"
"Lying around doing nothing got boring, so I want to try things I've never done before."
"So the thing Your Highness desired in the mortal realm was…… studying?"
"No, I'm going to try all sorts of other things too. There's so much I want to learn."
"Is learning not, in the end, studying?"
"Hm? Well, yes. Then let's say I want to do heaps of all kinds of studying."
"If Ansi were told to live like Your Highness, my head would ache so badly I would just keak—drop dead on the spot."
"That's only because when you studied, you were forced into it. Do it because you want to, and studying is so much fun."
"Yeeeesss?! Your Highness is always right, but…… r-right, but…… that's a bridge too far……"
Ansi pulled a face of utter revulsion. I chuckled and checked the hour.
"Kyaaak!"
"Your Highness? What is the matter?"
"I'm late!"
Every day these days I'd been meeting the Crown Prince in the backyard of Jamryongdang to help him practice wielding the darkness—and I had blown clean past the time we'd agreed upon!
I flung the book aside and shot up from my seat, then bolted across the corridor between Unyeondang and Jamryongdang, running flat out.
"Hah, hah, hooaaah……"
Only when I reached the backyard, gasping for breath, did Ansi glance me over and grumble—her own breathing not a hair out of place.
"Please do not overexert yourself for the sake of some mere human, Your Highness. It worries me so."
"This doesn't even count as overexertion for me. Where did he go, anyway?"
Did he get tired of waiting and go inside?
I was scanning the empty backyard and peering in through the windows when Ansi narrowed her eyes and pointed toward Jamryongdang's main gate.
"I hear human voices over there—and not just one or two of them."
"Hm? What's going on? Let's go see."
There was no one who should have been calling on the Crown Prince.
He had no eunuchs or guards now, and even his education as Crown Prince had been suspended entirely.
The East Palace roster was practically empty. Not a single tutor or scholar from the Crown Prince's tutorial office remained.
Crown Prince in name only, he was treated no differently from a confined criminal. Naturally, there was no one who would come and go for him.
I hurried toward the main gate, and sure enough, an ugly scene was unfolding there.
"Whoops, my apologies, Your Highness."
"……"
"Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that something sprawled in the middle of the street like this was the Crown Prince's supper! Forgive me, I truly didn't know."
A tall boy with a still-boyish face flashed a grin and looked around at the followers trailing behind him.
"How was I to know it wasn't just dog food? Isn't that right?"
"Left out there on the dirt like that, no wonder the honorable Prince Waneon mistook it for dog food."
"See? You heard it yourself, Your Highness. You can hardly blame me for doing it on purpose, can you now?"
So THAT'S who's been barking all this nonsense.
So that's Prince Waneon.
A creature whose face was every bit as contemptible as his manner of speaking was looking down at the Crown Prince's bowed head.
Between them, a small dining table lay overturned.
It must have been set before the main gate originally, but whether kicked over or shoved aside, the bowls lay scattered everywhere, and the side dishes, the rice, even the soup were spilled across the ground in a ruin.
Hold on—the Crown Prince's meals were left out on the ground in front of the main gate, just like that?
Meaning he had to carry all that in himself, right on schedule?
And why were the side dishes so meager? The soup didn't even seem to have anything in it.
The treatment was truly outrageous. It was a wonder he'd never been deposed at all.
Locked away in the East Palace, cut off from his education, fed like this…… If they were going to treat a child this way, they might as well have stripped him of the title outright.
In any case, it looked as though this Waneon had deliberately kicked over the table and was now twisting the knife with that insufferable chatter.
Watching it made my blood boil—but the Crown Prince showed little reaction, whether from restraint or from sheer numbness to it all.
He stared silently down at the overturned table, and when he lifted his head, Waneon raised his arms in exaggerated alarm and backed away.
"Ooh, how frightening."
"……"
"You're not going to kill me in a fit of rage over one little mistake, are you, Your Highness? Like some monstrous beast rather than a person?"
"……"
"I do enjoy my sleep, you see, but I've no desire to slumber on and on for two straight years like Her Majesty the Queen Dowager."
"……!"
"Don't look at me like that, it's terrifying. I'm not hardened enough to commit unfilial treason the way you did and still strut about with my chin held high."
The Crown Prince, who seemed on the verge of retorting, dropped his head instead. I could see the boy's clenched fists trembling.
Waneon shrugged at his own crowd and kept prattling on.
"If it were me, I'd know shame and hang myself by my own neck. But you, Your Highness……"
Wow. I really cannot watch this anymore.
I strode toward the gate, unhurried but deliberate. Hearing my footsteps, they all turned toward me.
The Crown Prince looked flustered. Waneon whistled.
"My lady."
"The silver-haired little one—why, it's my sister-in-law, isn't it? Even prettier than the rumors made you out to be. If you just keep growing up this nicely, you'll grow into quite the beauty after my own taste."
At Waneon's snickering, the Crown Prince—who had held his silence until now—cut back with a blade's edge in his voice.
"Brother. That is Her Highness the Crown Princess. Mind your courtesies."
"And what exactly have I done wrong? Oh—is it the title? My younger brother's wife would be my sister-in-law, would she not?"
"My lady, please go inside."
"That's too cruel, Your Highness. We've only just met, and you won't even grant me time for a greeting? We're family now, aren't we? And I happen to have something I've been meaning to tell you."
"What could you possibly have to say to Her Highness, Brother?"
"Why, only that your dear grandfather of mine stands suspected of being the mastermind behind the assassins who attacked my sister-in-law at the Royal Investigation Bureau. Him. That paragon of integrity."
"……"
"He's utterly beside himself over it. Honestly—to take the word of some worthless eunuch and leap to such a slander…… So I thought, if my sister-in-law happens to be laboring under that misunderstanding, I might clear it up for her personally."
How does every single word out of his mouth come out so vilely polished? There's nothing to sift out—pure filth all the way through.
[Your Highness, shall this Ansi just rip that creature's snout clean off, daring to speak so of you—]
[No! Hold on just a little longer. He's human, Ansi. Bear with it for me.]
Emotionally, I was entirely on Ansi's side—but that was no way to solve the problem.
While I soothed the seething Ansi and moved to step forward, the Crown Prince took a stride ahead and stretched out his arm, drawing me behind him.
Is he seriously trying to protect me right now? This tiny thing? Goodness.
"I don't believe that is for you to do, Brother. Go home."
"My, my, newlyweds, are we? To see the young Crown Prince already grown so manly, shielding his own little wife—well, it warms this brother's heart right through. Perhaps you ought to show your parents a little of the same devotion, hm?"
I held back a moment, touched by the child's resolve to shield me—but truly, I couldn't listen to any more of this.
I slipped out from under the Crown Prince's arm and looked up at Waneon, opening my mouth.
"You can't tell dog food from a person's supper, my lord—yet somehow you know for certain whether His Highness cares for his parents or not? What a talent."
For an instant, Waneon's mouth floundered open and shut. Then he let out a scoffing laugh.
"……Ha? The little brat can't tell heaven from earth, babbling away like……"
"I really can't tell which of you can't tell heaven from earth right now. A royal who has never once been admitted to the palace, never received a proper title—behaving this insolently before His Highness the Crown Prince?"
The present King had only one child by the Queen: the Crown Prince, Cheon Gyeol-woo. There had never been a royal concubine at all.
And yet Prince Waneon existed, older than the Crown Prince, and the circumstances of why he was even floated as a candidate heir were rather complicated.
Seok-ran explained it all to me.
Back when the current King was still a prince, the Crown Prince had been not him, but the King's elder brother—Grand Prince Gang-on.
And this Grand Prince Gang-on had been no ordinary degenerate—there had even been talk of deposing him outright.
Even with such talk swirling, Gang-on couldn't stop his debauchery. He scaled a wall and violated a young lady of a respectable household—and that young lady was the Left State Councilor's daughter by a concubine.
In exchange for abetting the assault, the Left State Councilor intended to make his daughter the Crown Princess and himself the Crown Prince's father-in-law.
She was, after all, the Councilor's daughter even if baseborn—and carrying the Grand Prince's child besides, so she still had prospects.
But before either the deposition or the wedding could be settled, Grand Prince Gang-on went out boating on the river, fell into the water, and abruptly died.
The present King naturally became Crown Prince in his place, and the Councilor's daughter never entered the palace.
The child that daughter bore outside the palace walls was Prince Waneon.
In short: the illegitimate son—though born after the father's death—of Grand Prince Gang-on, the late elder brother of the present King.
His name was Cheon Jin-woo, and he was fifteen—four years the Crown Prince's senior.
Because he was the child the dead Grand Prince had fathered outside the walls while talk of deposition still raged, Waneon had never been formally admitted to the palace nor granted a proper title.
Even so, his status as Gang-on's only son was acknowledged, and with the Left State Councilor's influence behind him, he had at least been entered into the royal clan registry under the title of Prince Waneon.
And before the Crown Prince became the Eodukseoni, this man wasn't even permitted to set foot in the palace at all, I heard.
Whether my words had struck a raw nerve, Waneon's face flushed mottled red and blue in an instant.
"Who never received a proper title?! I am Grand Prince Waneon, the legitimate eldest son of Grand Prince Gang-on! My name stands properly recorded in the Royal Clan Registry!"
"I heard the title of Grand Prince is reserved for the Queen's true-born sons. Since you are neither a legitimate son nor a prince at all, my lord, I don't see how you could be called one—could you?"
"You insolent little witch!"
Seething, Waneon raised his palm high, ready to strike.