A Pinky Promise
"So because it never existed in the first place, you're saying the Dark Command Arts will become whatever I go on to make of it?"
"Exactly, Your Highness. You're the one who will shape it—a new sorcery for commanding the uncanny."
"Not monsters, but... the uncanny. And sorcery."
The Crown Prince murmured this in a daze, then lifted his head and gazed at me intently.
"Now I finally understand why you insisted on naming this power a sorcery at all, my lady."
He wore the expression of a Daoist master who had just achieved a great enlightenment.
Apparently the Crown Prince had spun some tremendously profound interpretation out of the name "Dark Command Arts."
I hadn't actually thought that deeply when I named it. I just picked it because it was easy to explain...
'Whatever. Good is good, I suppose.'
Brushing past the matter, I rubbed at my eyes, which had begun to droop, and spoke up.
"So that's how you used this power to sneak into the Sangdan and steal the Left State Councilor's secret ledger, Your Highness?"
"...!"
The Crown Prince flinched, then protested.
"You knew about that?"
"I heard about it yesterday."
Before he could ask who had told me, I shot a sidelong glance at the little rascal, my lips pursed in a pout.
"You do realize how dangerous that was, don't you?"
"...I do."
"Did His Majesty scold you?"
"Yes... and Her Majesty the Queen scolded me as well."
"Then I won't scold you on top of it. But!"
I stuck out my pinky and declared with exaggerated solemnity.
"Promise me you won't turn me into a widow before I've even had my coming-of-age ceremony."
This little rascal—looking all meek and mild, but he has no fear at all.
'No, wait. Looking at the size of the shadow he's raised with the Eodukseoni, the boy's actually full of fear.'
So it wasn't just fear—he was also recklessly overstocked with courage, apparently. What kind of child goes around doing such dangerous things?
'If I at least extract a promise, maybe he'll be a bit more careful.'
I couldn't vouch for what he'd do after my coming-of-age ceremony, so up until then, at least.
When the Crown Prince looked at my outstretched pinky, a boyish grin—unlike his earlier demeanor—spread across his face, and he hooked his finger around mine.
"I could hardly make you a widow, my lady."
"You'll be more careful from now on?"
"I promise."
"Then we're good."
The Crown Prince and I sealed our promise with linked pinkies. As we smiled at each other, our fingers tangled and came apart, warmth lingering between them.
Somehow it felt warm, and a little ticklish too.
'Come to think of it, this is the first time since Mom and Dad that I've made a pinky promise with anyone.'
For no particular reason, I rubbed my pinky, then raised my head.
"Oh, right—Your Highness, we're holding the memorial rite together at the upcoming Unryong Festival, aren't we?"
"Yes. As it happens, I heard it was finalized at today's morning audience."
"Finalized today?"
"The court has been preoccupied with other matters, so it kept stalling—but today the ministers pushed the discussion forward aggressively, and a decision was reached."
So the Left State Councilor, who had been uncooperative all this while, had thrown himself into cooperation once he decided to plot his scheme.
"You'll be presiding over it yourself, won't you?"
"Yes. That, too, was decided rather suspiciously easily..."
The Crown Prince's brow creased faintly.
The Crown Prince personally presiding over the memorial rite was a symbolic event that would mark the restoration of his political standing.
No wonder it sat uneasily with him that Prince Waneon's faction had let it pass so readily.
Of course, I knew exactly why they had, so I felt no unease at all.
'If anything, I'm looking forward to it.'
I had already seen every scheme those scoundrels were planning as their grand atrocity. For me, it was a plot so transparent I could handle it with a yawn.
I played innocent and beamed.
"Let's work hard preparing for the memorial rite together!"
The fifteenth day of the twelfth month, in the thirteenth year of Seogwang.
The night the year's final full moon would rise.
The day of the Unryong Festival, at the Altar of Heaven.
The Altar of Heaven of Woon Country stood on an island ringed by the Unmun River, which cut straight through the capital of Unseong.
The small island rose in a gentle hill, comprising the altar atop the hill where the rite to Heaven would be performed, and a wide clearing below from which one could gaze up at it.
'So it's called the Sacred Isle of Heaven because the only things on the island are the altar and the plaza beneath it.'
The island seemed to be managed outright as a kind of holy ground—a red-spiked gate stood visible at the entrance of the stone bridge that connected the riverbank to the island.
The royal procession carrying the King passed through the red gate first, followed in turn by the Queen, the Crown Prince, and then my palanquin.
I cracked open the palanquin's little window and surveyed the plaza.
'Whoa, there are so many humans!'
They said the Unryong Festival was the largest rite in the country, a kind of festival as well—and the crowds who had gathered packed the plaza shoulder to shoulder.
'If things go wrong, people will be trampled to death. If we fail to properly block Prince Waneon's faction's tricks, someone's bound to get hurt.'
Right beside my palanquin, Ansi—dressed to the nines in court maid's robes—whispered anxiously through the open window slats.
"Why have you opened the window, Your Highness? The wind is blowing through something fierce, Princess."
"This body doesn't suffer from a little breeze. Haven't I built up plenty of stamina these days with archery practice and all those walks?"
"Still, please be careful. I worry you'll catch a cold."
"All right, I won't overdo it."
I answered meekly and closed the window.
The clamor had died down, but the procession's music—a riotous medley of drums and trumpets—still rang out.
'Seok-ran must be among those musicians, right?'
I'd assigned her the task again today, so she would no doubt have slipped herself neatly into the royal band without my asking.
Thinking of Seok-ran naturally brought her older brother to mind as well.
Seok-juk, aspiring Cheonho. The fox yokai who had agreed to guard Seol Deunghwa until she could safely stand on her own, in exchange for points added to my tally of good deeds.
'And Seol Deunghwa... should be well on her way to Pyeong by now.'
With the Queen having safely awakened, Seol Deunghwa no longer had any excuse to remain camped in Woon Country.
While my body, as her daughter, lay ill, she had at least been able to hold out—but once I had shaken off my sickness and risen, it was truly time for her to return to Pyeong.
And so, not long ago, Seol Deunghwa had departed for the Empire alongside Pyeong's delegation of envoys.
Together with the mountains of gifts the King had packed for her, in gratitude for curing the Queen.
Seok-juk had transformed into a tiny fox and slipped himself discreetly among those gifts. Pretending to be a pet fox, no less.
'I taught her a surefire way to fake her death, supplied the poison for the Emperor, and even attached a fox yokai pushing nine hundred years as her bodyguard... she should be able to have her revenge and make her escape without a hitch.'
I'd told her to contact me the moment she escaped the imperial palace and reached somewhere safe, so all that remained was to wait for word from Seol Deunghwa.
'The secret ledger... in the end, the proof still isn't complete.'
The little rascal of a Crown Prince had gone through all that trouble to bring it back, but that damned Left State Councilor kept digging in his heels, dragging the matter out by every means imaginable and wriggling this way and that to slip free.
There was also the problem that with the Unryong Festival right around the corner and preparations for the memorial rite underway, the country could hardly stage a major undertaking.
'Not that the Crown Prince's efforts were for nothing.'
Without that ledger, the King and the royalist faction would have been beaten back on the counterattack, and the Crown Prince would have been deposed.
'...Still, no matter how I look at it, the reason they can't properly punish the Left State Councilor even holding evidence as weighty as that ledger has to be the Chief State Councilor.'
The Chief State Councilor—head of the Moderate Faction's ministers.
At a glance he seemed to take no one's side, neither the royalists nor Prince Waneon's faction, maintaining a careful neutrality. But having watched him for the past month, I thought otherwise.
'Combining what I've observed of the court through the Left State Councilor with the palace intelligence Seok-ran has fetched for me, I'm all but certain.'
The Chief State Councilor was not maintaining any objective neutrality.
He was quietly lending strength to whichever side was losing at any given moment, deliberately keeping the two sides in balance.
As if he wished for no one to emerge victorious.
'A while ago... I suspected the mastermind behind Ruhwa's assassination was someone with real power who wanted Woon Country to remain in turmoil.'
Right now, with Prince Waneon's faction and the royalists locked in their squabbles, the Chief State Councilor as head of the Moderates held the greatest power in the court.
During the East Palace arson, there had been the arsonist from the Sangdan connected to the Left State Councilor—and the fire ghosts, who had come searching from an entirely different direction.
During the attempt on Ruhwa's life, the Left State Councilor had used the Crown Prince's eunuch and prepared assassins.
Yet what had actually killed Ruhwa on the eve of the wedding hadn't been the assassins at all, but a blade of lethal force hurled by someone else.
'A method that doesn't rely on hired men but on the Gwoeryeoknansin. When the Left State Councilor leaves traces and deploys assassins or arsonists, something slips in covertly alongside—yokai or sorcery that makes the traces all but impossible to trace...'
The odds were high that whoever shared a method shared a mastermind.
'The blade that flew at Ruhwa, the fire ghosts sent to Unyeondang—both of them... couldn't they be the Chief State Councilor's doing?'
No hard evidence, but my instincts were singing.
He was suspicious in every possible way.
'The King and the other ministers probably have no idea. The only reason I noticed the Chief State Councilor quietly balancing both sides is that I've observed the situations of both factions firsthand.'
That was thanks to hearing the royalists' situation as Crown Princess, watching the Left State Councilor's every move as his little food-taster, and gathering intelligence on all manner of people within the palace through Seok-ran.
That said, the Right State Councilor—himself a Moderate, and one of the Three Great Ministers—seemed to grasp the Chief State Councilor's true intentions to some degree.
Whenever the Left State Councilor spouted nonsense about the authenticity of the secret ledger, the Right State Councilor would now and then sidle in and push back.
'And he was the one who told me about the East Palace fire, too... in practice, the Right State Councilor is practically one of the royalists.'
Even so, because his wife, Lady Sim, had died during the Black Jade Incident, he simply couldn't bring himself to stand with the King and the Crown Prince in his heart.
'Watching the court over the past month, the Right State Councilor is easily the best of the lot.'
Of the Three Great Ministers, he seemed to be the only one who cared about actually governing the country. Honestly, it looked like he was doing all the work single-handedly, too.
It would be wonderful if we could somehow pull the Right State Councilor over to the Crown Prince's side.
Was there no way but to earn his gratitude by stopping the plague epidemic that would one day strike his family? But that wasn't due for another three years...
'Ugh, what a headache.'
It was all the more frustrating because, as a Crown Princess who was an Empire native of mixed minority blood and only nine years old, there was very little I could do openly.
'Still, once today is over, everything will change.'
If all went well, I might even dispatch the Left State Councilor in a single blow.
While I turned all these worries over in my head, the royal procession reached the Altar of Heaven and came to a halt.
When the palanquin's door opened, a handsome boy's face appeared before me.