A Thank-You and a House
"Settle down already."
Cassion pushed me away. Paying him no mind, I went on bustling about at his side.
Even the brusque Cassion was a welcome sight — I was simply glad he had woken up. It was agonizing, watching a child who ought to be codded for years to come moan in and out of consciousness. And I carried a guilt toward Cassion besides, which made it heavier still.
In my past life, I had turned my back on him. Not deliberately — but seeing the state he was in now, the guilt came whether I wanted it or not. I came and went at Cassion's side on the pretext of our marriage, yet beneath it lay an apology for my own sin.
It's not as if I'm in any position to swear it was never deliberate.
I had known full well that Cassion lived inside the palace, and that Julia and Dayson viewed him with distaste.
I was no different from them. I, too, had turned violence upon Cassion — and closing one's eyes to violence is only violence under another name.
"How is your body? How do you feel?"
I asked, replacing the wet cloth that had slipped from his forehead. Cassion said nothing for a long while.
Had he dropped off again? His eyes were squeezed shut.
Carefully I reached out and freed the strands of hair clinging to his brow, one by one; each time my fingers grazed his forehead by accident, his eyebrows flinched.
"Your sleeping act isn't fooling anyone. Shall I stop talking? Am I a bother?"
"…No…"
Cassion answered at last.
"Was I out long?"
His eyes opened properly now, and he asked in a cracked voice. I sat up straight in my chair and smiled.
"Half a day, give or take?"
The sun was already climbing. When I had arrived it had been night — and somewhere along the way, I had ended up passing the night in Cassion's palace.
"You nursed me?"
"I changed your cloth and fed you your medicine. I'd call that nursing."
"Medicine?"
He went on guard at once. He should have known it wasn't poison — he'd woken up after taking it — and still he bristled, hackles raised like a cat meeting a stranger.
"It brings the fever down and protects the body. And the results speak for themselves — you're awake."
Cassion looked astonished that any medicine worked on him at all. Then, his expression unreadable, he murmured:
"Thank you."
"…What?"
What did I just hear?
"I'm not saying it twice."
Going by his reaction, I had heard him right.
"Did you just say thank you?"
Cassion clamped his mouth shut — but the tips of his ears had gone red.
How precious. He was embarrassed enough to refuse saying it twice, and he'd said it anyway. To me.
I felt like a mother who had drilled a child who couldn't add and subtract through endless lessons until he finally scored a perfect hundred.
Aigoo, precious thing. Should I pat his head?
My hand reached out — and fell back. Cassion was not Rebert.
Unlike Rebert, who basked in my doting, Cassion pulled a face as if he'd swallowed spoiled milk every time I tried to coddle him.
"Well, I did do something worth a thank-you. I hired Your Highness an extraordinary physician. Then I stayed at your side all night, changing your cloth."
"You didn't sleep at all?"
Cassion stole a glance at my face. The worry seeping out of him, quiet and unbidden, drew a laugh from me.
I was two whole years older than Cassion, but I was still a child myself. A child who had pulled an all-nighter at his bedside — anyone with a conscience would worry, and feel a little sorry.
"No, I slept. They say beauties are heavy sleepers. I tried to stay awake — no use. I napped here and there. At Your Highness's side."
"What? At my side? In my bed? Here?"
Cassion shot upright like a released spring — far too nimble for an invalid.
"No. Here."
I pointed, dead serious, at the chair I had been sitting in. His bed was wide, with room to spare, but I wasn't shameless enough to covet a patient's bed.
Cassion let out a long, extravagantly relieved breath.
Was sharing a bed really so repugnant to him? Apparently he had a surprisingly fierce attachment to his own things.
"Anyway — are you truly all right?"
I had to ask my first question all over again.
Cassion, up anyway, leaned back against the headboard, prodded at himself here and there, then nodded slowly.
"I am. Strangely enough."
Rebert's medicine works beautifully. I'll have to tell him when I get home.
"Are you up for talking?"
"Yeah. I'm fine."
Cassion drank some water. He had demanded it cold, wanting to be fully sharp, but on my veto he had to settle for lukewarm.
"Your Highness, do you lose consciousness often?"
"Sometimes?"
Cassion said it as though it were nothing.
"'Sometimes' — as in collapsed for more than a day at a time?"
Cassion nodded his confirmation.
That is not a trivial matter!
"I'm as careful as I can be, but when something I never saw coming happens…"
"What happened?"
If the unexpected was what felled him, then something unexpected had happened just before I arrived.
I needed to know what it was.
"By the way — why did you nurse me? You could have just left me sleeping."
Cassion was deflecting, none too subtly. That wasn't what mattered.
"How could I leave a sick person behind? What if you died? Last night, Your Highness was sick enough that dying wouldn't have surprised anyone."
"So what if I died."
"Good heavens! Listen to yourself. Yes, death comes for everyone — but at our age, it would be nothing short of a calamity. Your Highness, have some respect for your years."
An eleven-year-old, talking like an old man who had seen the whole world. Then again, the tone I took scolding him wasn't exactly befitting a thirteen-year-old either.
"I'd say you and I have both given up on remaining children."
The bitterness in his voice burst the bubble of my effort to keep the mood light.
I swept my disheveled hair back with a light hand.
"Fair enough. You with your revenge, me with a family to protect at any cost — childhood is behind us both. Even so: when it hurts, you say so, and you rest. So rest a little today."
This little brat.
I pressed a finger firmly into Cassion's forehead. He scowled and rolled his eyes up to glare at me.
"Lie down. Or shall I lie down with you? I could sing you a lullaby, if you'd like."
"No!"
Cassion recoiled in horror and burrowed into his blankets.
Old man or not, at moments like this he really was a child.
"His Majesty stopped by."
It seemed Cassion had finally found the will to talk, because he raised it himself.
"I see."
I answered as though it were nothing. If I showed too much interest, Cassion would surely shut his mouth again.
And I had no wish to rake up his painful memories without cause — not when he had only just steadied, and might lose consciousness again if he started remembering.
"You don't have to tell me. Your Highness, focus on resting."
"…Could you get it?"
Cassion cut me off.
"What?"
A faint voice drifted out from the bundle of blankets.
"I… asked whether you could buy me a house."
"…!"
Cassion had said something incredible even as I heard it. He was asking me to buy him a house!
This was an opportunity.
I wanted to hear exactly what he needed me for — but first I had to seize the opening.
Even if it strained my own means, I would see it done. Clutching the hem of my dress, I flashed my brightest smile.
"I could buy you ten."
Confident as I had sounded, the house Cassion wanted was not one that could simply be bought.
The mansion he had asked me to purchase was the home he had once shared with the late Queen — the place known as Twilight Mansion.
It had been left to languish since Cassion entered the palace, and yet somehow it had surfaced at auction.
"I hear the Queen has her eye on it."
And the one coveting that mansion was Julia — Dayson's mother, the reigning Queen.
She despised Cassion. So why would she want to buy the Twilight Mansion where he had spent his childhood?
"The way Twilight Mansion came onto the market is fishy, too."
Cho went on, watching me flip through the pages. The documents held everything her investigation had turned up about the mansion.
"And you're no better. Why the sudden urge to buy Twilight Mansion, of all things?"
According to Cho's report, Twilight Mansion was a building of historical note — and a purchase that would turn no profit whatsoever. The location was poor, too.
"It's a betrothal gift."
"What?"
"I told you, didn't I? That I'm going to marry Prince Cassion. And Prince Cassion wants that mansion."
Cho let out a long, nasal sigh and flopped into the chair at her desk. Swinging her legs, she studied me.
Ignoring her gaze, I pored over the circumstances that had put the house up for auction.
Twilight Mansion, left behind by the late Queen Violetta, was due to pass automatically to Cassion upon his coming of age. And yet it had abruptly gone up for auction.
"The late Queen Violetta ran up an enormous debt to the bank? Even though the palace kept paying her living expenses?"
Queen Violetta had been deposed on the grounds that she could bear no children. It had happened within a year of King Karman gaining Dayson from Julia.
Violetta's own family scorned their discarded daughter. Deposed, with no family left to support her, Violetta stood on the brink of isolation.
Just as her life was set to plunge into destitution, Karman stepped in.
King Karman rewrote the law so that even a deposed queen would receive a living allowance.
Did His Majesty love Queen Violetta, then?
A law changed overnight — and Cassion, born after her deposition. It was evidence enough to believe King Karman had loved her.
Then what am I to make of how harmoniously he lived with Julia?
And yet Karman's conduct remained impossible to read. Setting the unanswerable question aside, I combed through the report once more.
"She was never one for luxury, either…"
"She wasn't. I hear she kept barely any maids, just to stretch the pittance the palace paid her."
"Then why would she have needed such a large sum?"
"Her son's medicine?"
That wasn't the answer either. Cassion's medicine was paid by the palace, separate from her living expenses.
Cassion was a prince born of a deposed queen — but he was the king's blood, and the palace saw to his keep.
"She must have had somewhere to spend it."
Cho brushed it off as nothing. I, on the other hand, felt the prickle of an instinct: this was where the digging had to start.
"Something's wrong here, Auntie. This is where I'm starting."
"You truly mean to buy Twilight Mansion?"
"Of course."
"The Queen won't sit quietly by. Did I never tell you what sort of woman Queen Julia is?"
She had. One night, when I told her in earnest that I meant to marry Cassion.
Cho had asked, ever so casually, what I thought of marrying Dayson instead.
If the marriage was for the family's sake, she'd argued, then Dayson — Julia's blood, backed by a prestige said to make even birds drop from the sky — was by far the sounder choice.
I refused. When I begged her not to ask why, Cho had talked about Julia instead.
Her temperament was anything but ordinary.
She cherished Dayson to the point of obsession.
Dayson already acted as though the crown were his by right.
Around her, people vanished without explanation.
A beautiful flower, breathing poison.
From testimony worth trusting to rumor stitched from whole cloth, every story pointed to a single truth.
Julia was a rotten bitch, and picking a fight with her would only mean I came out the loser.
Of course I knew. Having lived through it, I understood far better than Cho, who knew only by hearsay.
And precisely because I knew, Dayson and Julia would never be candidates — not even as a last resort.