A Child, or a Divorce
"……?"
"……?"
Laniakea and Hyperion stared blankly at each other. Both of them wore the look of people who doubted their own ears. They tilted their heads as if the words they had just heard refused to settle into any sense at all, and then each of them blurted out the single word in the other's sentence that baffled them most.
"A child?"
"A divorce?"
The moment Laniakea murmured it, Hyperion echoed her in the same breath, his face slack with disbelief. Then they spoke again, together.
"A child… with me?"
"Divorce me?"
Only then did the two of them startle and look at one another. Silence, thick with a fresh wave of confusion, settled over the room once more.
Laniakea raised a hand and tapped at her ear. Every sound was coming through clearly enough: birdsong beyond the window, the faint stir of movement in the corridor, even the intermittent creak peculiar to a building with history in its bones. If she could hear all of that, she had not imagined the words. And yet she could not bring herself to accept them.
A child? Between her and the First Imperial Prince?
Only now, far too late, did she grasp what he had been asking for, and her eyes shook without mercy.
Hyperion, catching the turmoil in her, dragged a hand down his face.
"First… it seems we ought to talk."
A fine fragrance rose from the teacups a servant had set down and left behind. Laniakea could not drink. The silence in the room still felt as though it might go on forever.
She was fidgeting needlessly with her cup when Hyperion spoke.
"Why do you want a divorce?"
"Why? Well, naturally… because you're going to become emperor…."
Laniakea knew her place perfectly well. A princess with a passable face — and she knew just as well that, in this Imperial Palace, such qualifications were worth very little. A princess? If the Empire went looking for its next empress, every kingdom on the continent would send one of its own. Her looks? Even Laniakea herself did not think her face was bad. But an empress was not a post where a face mattered. It was a seat that required the ability to turn, alongside the emperor, the vast machinery of an empire.
Her, in a position like that? Absurd. Worse still, she was the very woman the Empress — Hyperion's political rival — had personally chosen.
"Surely… wouldn't it be better if the empress were someone who could be a greater strength to the Empire's future than I ever could?"
Hyperion let out a short sigh.
"You sound exactly like the ministers."
Of course. The ministers who had looked at her so coldly only a little while ago must have offered their counsel on the matter of the empress and then taken their leave.
Hyperion looked straight at her and went on.
"What the ministers say is not wrong."
At his answer, Laniakea bowed her head before she could stop herself. She already knew she was of no help to him whatsoever, and still, hearing it from his own mouth made her chest grow heavy. There was nothing she could do about that.
"Then why, with me…."
She could not bring herself to say the word child again, and her voice trailed off. Fortunately, Hyperion seemed to understand what she meant to ask. He nodded and answered.
"If I did as the ministers advise, everything would settle more quickly in the early days after the coronation. But I cannot repeat the mistakes of the previous reign."
Laniakea nodded. She knew exactly which mistake he meant.
He's wary of another faction growing too powerful.
She knew all too well how freely the current Empress had seized the imperial household and shaken it to her liking. Laniakea herself was a prince's consort the Empress had picked out and brought in on a whim. Even while the Emperor was still sound, the Empress had meddled aggressively in affairs of state. After he collapsed, she gathered every matter into her own hands and kneaded it as she pleased. That her family and relatives reaped enormous profit along the way was only natural. There was even a barbed joke making the rounds — that more carriages arrived at the Empress's house than ever passed through the Imperial Palace.
From the imperial family's point of view, none of it was good. What ought to have remained wholly with the imperial house was leaking away elsewhere, and the more it leaked, the further imperial authority fell while the noble houses rose. Hyperion had no wish to watch that happen any longer.
"And."
He put more weight into his voice as he continued.
A faint reproach colored the words, sharp enough to feel like a rebuke for forgetting something so obvious.
"But…."
The sense of being scolded left Laniakea oddly wronged. It was true that she had married him. But in the past three years, how many times had they even come face to face?
Ten, perhaps?
He returned to the palace about once every four months. He shared a single meal with her, and then, without staying even a day at the Annex Palace, he left again at once. Naturally, nothing resembling a real conversation passed between them over those meals. When she asked about life on the northern border, he answered only briefly — yes, no, or a request that she understand he could not speak of things that were not pleasant to hear. At first she had tried, more than once, to keep the talk going, but when that was all that ever came back, she could not bring herself to ask anything else.
So their meals went on in profound quiet. The beginning of each one was already awkward, but worst of all was the time at the end, when they drank tea together. How uncomfortable it was, simply sitting there in silence. In the end, all Laniakea could manage was pointless chatter about some newly acquired tea leaves, and Hyperion, of course, said nothing beyond yes, I see.
So when she learned that he would become emperor, she had assumed as a matter of course that he would divorce her and send her away. Then why was he looking at her as though she had wounded him?
Just then, he asked her another question.
"If we divorce, do you mean to return to Priatra? Is there someone there waiting for you…."
"No!"
The moment Priatra's name left his mouth, Laniakea shook her head hard.
"I never want to go back there. There isn't anyone waiting for me, either."
She thought of the family that had always been cold to her. If she returned to Priatra, their faces would only grow colder still.
"I see. Very well, then. May I have your hand?"
Hyperion, whose expression had somehow softened into something like relief, drew a handkerchief from his pocket and held it out to her. Only then did Laniakea realize the tea had spilled over and was wetting her fingers. The cup had cooled somewhat, which was a mercy, but the heat she noticed a moment too late still sent color rushing into her face as she reached for the cloth he offered.
The instant she leaned closer, though, he took her hand as naturally as breathing and wiped it himself. The gesture was so effortless that she never even thought to pull away. She simply stared, dazed, and left her hand in his.
He dried it with care. Watching the white handkerchief stain at once with tea, she realized the cloth was familiar.
"This is…."
"Yes. The one you sent me."
His voice lifted a little, as if he were glad she remembered.
"I have kept it carefully ever since I received it."
At his words, Laniakea's face flushed. Not from joy. From embarrassment.
Once a year, the Imperial Palace held an event to send comfort gifts to the knights posted far from home. Hosted by the Empress and opened as the year drew to a close, it filled a banquet hall with long tables, and the guests set their offerings upon the table marked with the name of whichever region they wished to favor. It was the Empress's banquet, and every guest was a noble of a distinguished house, so the gifts they gave were, without exception, splendid things — rings, bracelets, and brooches they had been wearing, even checks written out on the spot.
The greatest pile always rose before the placard for the border region where the Empress's younger brother was stationed. It was called a border, but it lay against a friendly nation along one of the greatest trade routes on the continent, and it was not dangerous in the least. Even so, the nobles laid their gifts there. The reason was obvious. They wished to please the Empress. Before the placard for the place where Hyperion was, by contrast, there was so little that it was almost shameful to look at.
On any ordinary day Laniakea would have hurriedly set down whatever she was wearing, but this time she could not. The jewels on her were not her own.
So that was why she offered to lend me jewelry for the banquet….
A few days earlier, strangely warm, the Empress had even sent a letter offering to lend her jewels. Laniakea had had no reason to refuse, and she had accepted them with thanks for the kindness. The intent, she understood now, had been to leave her with nothing she could set down as a gift.
A prince slighted even by his own wife. The Empress had likely wanted the nobles to see exactly that.
She and her circle came smiling toward the flustered Laniakea. They asked whether she had not known that gifts were expected, then told her, as if in comfort, not to worry too much — there would be another chance next year.
"If it's the First Imperial Prince, he'll be pleased no matter what his consort sends. A gift isn't about the price, is it? It's the thought that matters."
Spinning out words that sounded kind, the Empress wore a gentler smile than Laniakea had ever seen on her.
In the end, Laniakea had no choice but to set down the handkerchief in her hand — the only thing there that was truly hers. The muffled laughter behind her back was only to be expected.