The Marriage Contract
"That, Your Highness, is the Imperial Palace of Nervanan—the place they call the heart of the continent."
At the maid's words, Laniakea looked past the window at the immense building beyond.
The heart of the continent.
Some might have thought the epithet arrogant. Yet everyone who saw the Imperial Palace for the first time found themselves conceding the name. The palace of the Empire was that vast, that magnificent.
The maid, too, seemed to be waiting for Laniakea to look astonished.
Laniakea Friatra—princess of Priatra, a kingdom settled within the eastern Gigantes Mountains, the very edge of the continent. She had lived her whole life in such a place and was seeing the Empire's palace for the first time. Astonishment would have been only natural.
Getting around that on foot is going to be impossible.
That was Laniakea's honest impression upon first laying eyes on the Imperial Palace. She could hardly say so aloud, so she arranged her face into a suitable blend of surprise and admiration before she answered.
"It is truly beautiful. Even more splendid than I had imagined."
Perhaps Laniakea's composure, calmer than expected, failed to please. The maid pressed on in a more urgent tone, pouring out one explanation of the palace after another. The gate they were passing now had been raised in the reign of the first emperor. That garden had been made at the command of the empress of such-and-such a generation. And so on.
Listening only enough to be polite, Laniakea let the palace sliding past the window settle indifferently into her eyes—the place that was to become her new home, and yet stirred no feeling in her at all.
The carriage bearing Laniakea rolled on through the inner palace. Inner palace though it was called, it held more than ten buildings, each as vast as a great estate. The carriage halted before the largest and most ornate of them.
"We have arrived at Her Majesty the Empress's palace."
The Empress's Palace.
At the maid's words, Laniakea's throat worked in a hard swallow.
A princess of a minor kingdom, she had come to the Empire entirely by the Empress's will.
Two months earlier, a letter had arrived at the royal court of Priatra in the name of the Empress of the Nervanan Empire. The whole court was so astonished that they checked, again and again, whether the man who brought it was truly an envoy of Nervanan. And no wonder. Priatra was a minor kingdom shoved into a corner, powerless to sway the affairs of the continent. It sat within the Gigantes Mountains, famed for their ruggedness, and it possessed no resources worth coveting. No one desired the land.
Even so, among the many kingdoms of the continent, Priatra's name was reasonably well known. It was the oldest kingdom still in existence, and its royal house had inherited the Fairy bloodline—the blood of the Fairy race once said to have dwelt in the Gigantes Mountains.
As proof, the royals of Priatra were born with bright silver hair, the color said to belong to the Fairies, and with green eyes. Their faces, too, were so beautiful that a single glance made them impossible to forget.
Had that been all, some other kingdom would have trampled them long ago. Beauty was something everyone desired.
But the royals of Priatra had inherited the Fairies' power as well. Most of them could still wield spirit magic, an art now all but vanished from the world, and its might was formidable. The drawback was that the power could be used properly only within Priatra's own territory. Seen another way, that meant that inside Priatra they were mightier than any royal or imperial house. Thanks to that, the kingdom had endured for more than a thousand years.
They had been living quietly among themselves when, without warning, a personal letter arrived from the Empire.
The court opened the Empress's letter at once. It was long and thick with florid phrases, but the substance was simple. She wished to take Laniakea, third daughter of the King of Priatra, as wife to Hyperion, First Imperial Prince of the Nervanan Empire.
At that, every mouth closed, and every eye sought every other. They had understood at once what the Empress of the Empire wanted.
She meant to fasten a puppet of a consort—one with no backing whatsoever—to the First Prince, who was not her own son. Otherwise she would never have named Laniakea so precisely among the king's three daughters.
Laniakea Friatra: the weakest of Priatra's three princesses.
Unlike her elder sisters, whose spirit magic was so powerful that people praised them as the first king's very reincarnation, Laniakea was scarcely different from an ordinary human. The only spirits she could summon were lowest-tier spirits, and even those she could not call forth more than one at a time.
Her looks set her apart as well. Where her sisters had perfect silver hair, Laniakea's was platinum blonde shot through with gold. In any other kingdom the color would have been praised as beautiful. In the Priatran court they whispered that it was stained—dirtied.
And so, even at royal banquets, she was the princess who stood in a corner, kept her place in silence, and went home.
Of course, the prince who was to marry such a princess occupied an equally awkward place.
Hyperion's mother, the previous empress, had died when he was still young. The Emperor had taken a new empress, and she was Nervanan's empress now. The present Empress had borne three more sons. With three additional heirs, the Emperor cherished her dearly. As his favor deepened and he himself grew frail, her authority swelled.
And so, the year Hyperion turned eight, the Empress sent him to a monastery on the frontier. The official reason was convalescence: pining for his dead mother had ruined his health.
Sent to the border in that fashion, Hyperion was not permitted to set foot in the Imperial Palace again until last year, when he turned twenty-five. In the years between, every foundation he might have had vanished, and the Empress's seizure of real power was only to be expected. No one any longer believed he could become emperor.
Even so, the Empress wished to erase what little possibility remained, and to do it thoroughly. And so she had sought a bride for Hyperion who would look excellent on the surface and amount to nothing underneath.
That bride was Laniakea, princess of the Kingdom of Priatra.
When the marriage was decided, Laniakea considered what she herself could do. Refusing had never been an option. One did not refuse a request from the Empire.
More than that, what resolved her to marry was her family. The moment she saw her parents and sisters looking pleased—pleased at the thought that they could at last dispose of the household nuisance in so tidy a fashion—Laniakea understood that the time had come for her to leave.
Once I'm married, I'll be able to leave Priatra.
All the way into adulthood, family had been worse to Laniakea than strangers. Others at least observed the courtesy due a princess. Her parents and sisters had always treated her as the shame of the royal house.
And so, from childhood, she had wished for one thing. Someday she would leave the palace that treated her as a defective thing—no. She would leave Priatra itself.
But how?
By custom, most of Priatra's royals married nobles of their own kingdom. A royal who did not marry lived imprisoned in the palace for life. And then a proposal had come from abroad—from the Empress of an empire Priatra could not lightly refuse.
Laniakea thought of Prince Hyperion, the man who was to become her husband. A man with no faction to his name, who returned to the Imperial Palace once or twice a year at most. A man who would not look kindly on this marriage.
Surely, even if she came to the palace, he would keep his distance. Someday one of his younger brothers would take the throne, and he would have to move his residence outside it. Laniakea, of course, would have to follow him to some frontier domain of the Empire.
Then... couldn't I go on living quietly?
Hyperion would have plenty of grievances of his own. He might even demand a divorce before they ever left the palace. There was, of course, another possibility: that he might, against all expectation, take a liking to her.
Even so, it would be far better than marrying some other noble of Priatra.
The nobles of Priatra were already gossiping about who would marry Laniakea, now that she was of an age to have a match arranged. She might fall short of her sisters, but her beauty was still more than enough to be desired. And since she was treated as a daughter the royal house had cast off, they snickered that they could handle her a little roughly and she would have no complaint to make.
Unlike her powerful sisters, Laniakea was not someone they needed to fear. And so the noble houses of Priatra were eyeing her and licking their lips, as if she were a cut of meat with no owner.
When she heard them from a corner of the banquet hall, Laniakea swore that she would escape Priatra no matter what.
So this is my chance.
She made up her mind. She would go to the Empire. And there, tucked into some corner of the Imperial Palace, she would live as if she were not there at all.
"You've come a long way. You must be weary."
The Empress addressed Laniakea, standing before her, in a gentle voice.
She was the mother of three princes already grown, and yet no matter how one looked at her, she did not appear to be of such an age. But for all the youth and beauty of her face, her eyes glittered more sharply than those of any seasoned minister, and the sight of them set Laniakea on edge.
"Not at all. All the way here I was so lost in admiration of the Empire's beauty and majesty that I never once felt the fatigue."
At Laniakea's courteous reply, a smile rose to the Empress's face.
"They are things you will be seeing every day from now on. You'll grow used to them soon enough."
From the very first, the Empress addressed her with the easy condescension one used for an inferior. The state wedding had not yet been held, and however powerless the Third Princess might be, Laniakea was here as good as the representative of the Kingdom of Priatra.
"You'll be seeing a great deal of me as well, so there's no need to be so tense."
She could not be doing this out of ignorance. A woman who stood at the center of a palace infamous for its intrigues would never make a mistake of that sort. From the outset, the Empress was making it plain: Laniakea had no choice in this marriage, and Priatra was no power at her back.
"And yet, seeing you like this, I find the legends of Priatra are not empty after all. Wouldn't you all agree?"
At the Empress's words, the maids standing beside her nodded. Inwardly, they were startled.
Everyone knew the rumors about Priatra's royals—that they were born with beauty to match their power. But they had heard that the Laniakea coming this time was the least remarkable of the three princesses. Royal of Priatra or not, they had assumed her looks would be nothing extraordinary. And yet the moment that supposedly unremarkable Laniakea stepped into the Empress's Palace, she seized every eye in the room.
Platinum-blonde hair as bright as gathered sunlight, and green eyes the color of summer at its lushest green. The face that held them was so finely drawn that one wondered how features could be set so perfectly.
Just then came the sound of a knock. At the Empress's leave, an attendant entered, went straight to her side, and whispered something. The Empress's face showed her surprise.
"The First Prince is here? Already?"
She dismissed the attendant and turned to Laniakea.
"Princess. This is sudden, but you do know about the marriage contract, don't you?"