Not Long to Live
No — what was there to teach him? The ones who needed a thrashing were the bastards who'd raised him into such a rotten-tempered creature. As if the kid had turned out twisted because he wanted to be.
Blinking my big eyes and arranging the most innocent smile I could summon, I said, "Your Highness, even if I did come because of someone's fortune, as you claim, why on earth would I bare my teeth at you? Besides, I'm thirteen. Hardly the age to take a fortune reading and start slinking around with wicked little schemes."
My face — adorably endearing, blessed with only the best of my mother and father — was one of my great weapons. I knew precisely how much my carefully crafted air of innocence could soften a person.
"Whoever sent you clearly holds no fondness for me. And what's the point of putting on an act when I've already seen through you?"
But Cassion refused to be won over by my charms.
He's got real backbone for his age. And every word he says lands true. I liked that.
Still, I couldn't let him keep sneering at me. All the more so because we would have to get along from here on.
"Think before you speak. Don't just blurt out whatever comes to mind."
"That's rich, coming from a woman who barged uninvited into a prince's palace."
Had I offended him, barging in out of nowhere like that? It was a sharp, prickly observation, but it wasn't wrong.
"Give me just a moment."
I rose from my seat and stepped outside. Then I knocked politely on the door and begged admittance with flawless courtesy.
"Your Highness, I am Diana, daughter of House Ehrenberg and heir presumptive to the dukedom. This girl humbly begs leave to enter."
There. The very heights of courtesy.
From somewhere deep in the room came a volley of the names of every baby animal under the sun. By the time even the young of beasts I had never seen nor heard of in my life were invoked, the tirade broke off into a violent coughing fit.
Before long, the coughs gave way to heaving retches.
"......Your Highness?"
I abandoned my half-playful, half-serious request for permission and flung the door open.
Cassion, who had still been sitting on the sofa right up until I'd stepped out, had crumpled to the floor, coughing. Blood was smeared across the hand clamped over his lips and the floor beneath him.
"Your Highness Cassion!"
"How is he, Dallas?"
Without taking my eyes off Cassion, unconscious in the bed, I asked Dallas, the Ehrenberg family physician.
"His body is gravely weakened."
"Treatment? You can treat him, can't you?"
"I cannot promise that a body once so weakened will simply spring back."
"When people get over an illness, they're well again right away, aren't they?"
Dallas heaved a deep sigh as he continued to fuss with Cassion's wrist.
"With an ailment that merely passes through, that may be so. But in His Highness's case..."
Dallas fell silent. His expression had gone terribly dark.
Was it hard to say in front of the patient?
"Dallas, let's talk outside."
After ordering Jenice to keep watch over Cassion, I stepped into the corridor with Dallas. Even as he followed me, Dallas kept throwing glances back toward the bed.
"Tell me, Dallas."
Out in the corridor, shutting the door tightly behind us wasn't enough — I led Dallas into the room across the hall. The middle-aged physician meekly went where I led, despite my standing far smaller than he did.
"His Highness has not long left to live."
Dallas heaved a great sigh before spitting out those shocking words. But I did not believe him. I had watched him grow up healthy.
"You're saying it's incurable?"
"Yes. The medicine of today cannot even diagnose His Highness's illness. And so no remedy can be prescribed."
And yet Cassion had grown up perfectly sound and shown up at my own execution grounds. Which meant that somewhere, a cure had to exist.
"Dallas, did you examine him properly?"
"Yes, my lady. His Highness must be in a great deal of pain even now."
Dallas began to lay out Cassion's condition. Heard in full, it was dire. By his account, the fact that Cassion could so much as sit upright was a miracle.
And in that body, he had gone about hunting down this bastard and that bastard to curse them out. Judged by the sheer nerve of his cursing alone, he looked ready to fell an ox.
Was I to praise his iron will, or scold the fool for running a fever on top of a body that couldn't afford it...
"So you're telling me to just give up?"
"My lady, it is not surrender — it is acceptance. And as you well know, the royal palace already houses the finest physicians on the continent. They are the ones attending His Highness. There is nothing more I can do."
Could Dallas really look at Cassion's condition and at this palace and still reach for a word like attending?
This was the moment I began to doubt the man's eyesight. I pressed him as though cross-examining a witness.
"When will he wake up? You can at least tell me that much."
"That, too, I cannot promise."
Dallas looked as frustrated as I was at being unable to give a single straight answer. I understood his fluster — summoned without warning, made to deliver nothing but hard truths — and yet I was angry all the same.
A state in which he could die at any moment meant he could die today, this very instant. That absolutely could not be allowed to happen!
There had to be a way. Why else would he have grown healthy and come all the way to my execution grounds!
But if Cassion became a healthy adult in my past life, would that mean he'd grow healthy in this one too?
I found myself sinking back into a worry I had carried before. Hadn't my own life already changed? If this were still my old life, by now I would have welcomed Count Kolkos as my guardian and gone on to meet Dayson. Instead, here I stood in Cassion's palace.
The past has changed — which means he might die. Before I come of age.
Watching him faint from a coughing fit had left me far more anxious than the vague dread I had nursed before.
Even if the marriage succeeded, should he die, I would have to lay down the headship of my house once more. A minor who married into royalty enjoyed the status of family head only for as long as the marriage endured.
Which meant that to inherit my family unshakably, come what may, I had to keep my marriage to Cassion intact until we both came of age.
Above all, I need Cassion to complete the revenge I have only sketched so far. I was resolved to seat him upon the throne Dayson had craved so desperately. That would be the finale of my vengeance.
And besides, a debt of gratitude had to be repaid. I had already lost everyone I loved. I refused to go on living in debt besides.
Having thought that far, I shook off my brooding and gave Dallas my order.
"Do something. Anything."
"There is nothing I can do."
Dallas gave up without so much as a second thought.
"Is that any way for a physician to speak?"
"My lady..."
Dallas shook his head at me. He looked terribly troubled. Only when I realized how I must appear in his eyes — a little girl throwing a tantrum — did I rein in my temper.
"Fine, then go. Go back and find me anything at all connected to His Highness's illness."
A cure would be better still.
"And what will you do, my lady?"
"I'll leave once His Highness regains consciousness."
"The hour is late."
Worry brimmed in Dallas's voice.
"You are my family's physician — not my guardian."
At my cold tone, Dallas bowed his head. Somehow, the big man seemed smaller than I did. Only then did I recall the sense of failure he must have felt today, as a physician.
But I was too exhausted to console him. Cassion had collapsed right before my eyes, and getting Dallas into the palace had been no simple matter.
The moment Cassion fell, I had laid him in the bed and slipped back to rejoin the tour party. One misstep, and I might have witnessed Paulana turning the entire palace upside down in search of me.
Dreadful. Merely imagining it made me shudder. I had met with Paulana, pleaded poor health, and slipped out of the royal palace.
Afterward, Dallas and I had returned straight to the 3rd Prince's Palace — through the secret passage I had marked on my way in. Do not imagine the journey was easy just because I tell it briefly. Nothing in the royal palace is harder than escaping people's eyes. Fortune favored us: we reached the 3rd Prince's Palace without a single soul the wiser.
Dallas clearly found my conduct suspicious, yet he raised no objection and examined Cassion in earnest. For that alone he deserved credit, and yet... a physician ought to fight until the very end!
Irritably, I pushed open the door and entered Cassion's room.
His eyes remained closed. The wrists and ankles jutting from beneath the filthy blanket were skeletal. I swept my gaze around the room.
The unlit fireplace had left the room steeped in cold. Spring had arrived, but the nights were still bitter. Nobles sometimes lit their hearths even in summer...
Cassion's blanket was far too thin to hold back the chill and blotched a dirty yellow. Dust lay heaped like clouds in every corner of his needlessly vast room.
"Live in a place like this, and even the healthy would fall ill."
As though he had heard me, one of his fingers twitched. I snapped alert and hurried to the bedside.
"Your Highness! Your Highness! Can you hear me?"
I gripped him and shook. His body swayed like a sheet of paper. He felt so brittle in my hands, as if he might crumble to pieces, that I snatched them back at once.
There was no telling whether he had wasted away from hunger or from illness. I had definitely seen his hand stir, yet no matter how hard I shook him or shouted, Cassion did not so much as flinch. But the filthy blanket swaddling him kept grating on my nerves.
"Good things come to those who think good thoughts and wear good things."
My mother's saying rose to mind, and I stripped Cassion's blanket off and flung it away. In its place, I spread the coat I had worn here. With only his head poking out of the flower-embroidered garment, Cassion at last looked like a boy his own age.
No — who would ever take Cassion for eleven, stick-thin as he is? His height was fine; if only he would put on a little weight, he would be far easier on the eyes.
Looking at him kept wringing my heart. Perhaps because he overlapped with the me who had lost her parents too soon.
"Jenice, would you fetch one servant I can rely on? Someone you truly trust."
"Right now?"
The moon had not yet risen, and the night outside was black enough to swallow everything within arm's reach. Sending Jenice out alone on such a night worried me — but once she was clear of the palace, a carriage would be waiting. It would be fine.
"Yes. When you come, bring my blanket and my pillow, and my bed sheets, and... I had better write this down!"
I had meant to ask for just a few things we needed at once, but the list kept growing. Jenice and I turned Cassion's room upside down in search of paper and a pen.
Jenice kept muttering that disaster would strike if we laid hands on the prince's belongings without leave.
"I'll take full responsibility. Tell them I did it all myself. Now — start looking."
Reassured by that, Jenice began ransacking the drawers with abandon. Garments that looked impossibly small against Cassion's frame, and others absurdly large, jutted out of the drawers. Watching them only roused my anger, so I slammed the wardrobe shut and searched the desk instead.
"How is there not a single decent notebook?"
On Cassion's desk sat only a few books, unmistakably gifts from Dayson — the sort for children who had only just learned their letters. There was not even a fountain pen, that most essential of a noble's possessions.
In the end, I had to tear a page straight out of one of the books and write with Cassion's own blood, loosened from the floor where it had dried. The feeling of dissolving someone's dried blood in water for ink was the very worst.
"You won't be frightened, going and coming back alone?" I handed Jenice the finished note as I asked.
"I'll be fine — I have plenty of little friends with me."
Jenice did give strange answers sometimes. It worried me, but the confidence on her face told me it was safe to send her.
"I'll be right back!"
Jenice declared brightly, and left the palace.