Victoria
The Military Ministry oversaw every military affair of the Empire.
First Princess Victoria sat in her office within its halls, her back held at a perfect right angle, both hands resting upon her knees. She had kept that posture for hours without a single lapse. Anyone who did not know the circumstances might reasonably have taken it for a punishment.
She was not, of course, sitting like that without cause.
I was far too complacent.
What tormented her was the horrific scene she had witnessed at the military hospital. Patients wailing as they begged the nurses for morphine. Patients gulping down, in its place, a drug brewed from jimsonweed root. She had visited the hospital dozens of times to encourage the staff, yet never once had she seen anything like it.
It was not that she had merely pretended to look after the place while flaunting her influence. She had supported it regularly, so that it might function as it ought. Every season she bestowed gifts of comfort, and now and then she awarded bonuses to the military physicians. More than once she had carved into the subsidy she drew as a princess and added it to the operating funds. Thanks to her, the military hospital boasted facilities superior to any other.
She had thought that was enough. That she had done what could be done.
Seen properly, the conditions were wretched beyond belief. A ward into which fifty critical patients had been crammed. Beds jammed one against the next. A medical staff too few to tend them all as they deserved. She could not understand why she was realizing any of it only now.
Believing it sufficient had been nothing but my own delusion.
Had she paid even a little attention, she would have caught the shortcomings long ago. Why had she let them pass so carelessly? She brooded on it until, without noticing, her hands curled into fists.
"Your Highness!"
The man who had been watching her with pity raised his voice, as though he could bear it no longer.
A handsome man in his middle years, dressed in a splendid red coat — Hayden, Victoria's maternal uncle, and a serving general of the army. In his busy niece's stead he handled the business of state, and he had grown busier still after Third Princess Anais's sudden fall, occupied with managing the nobles who flocked to line up behind Victoria.
"Your Highness. This is not a matter you ought to take so much to heart."
"And on what grounds do you say so, Uncle?"
"It is only natural that patients with broken limbs and bullet wounds should suffer from the pain. ...Pitiable, of course. But the military hospital's facilities compare quite favorably with any hospital in the Empire. There are plenty of places that leave cripples and vagrants sprawled across filthy beds..."
"The patients at the military hospital are not vagrants. They are soldiers on active duty."
"......"
"I saw it on my way out. Nine patients were being evacuated, and every one of them had lost a foot to traps the elves had laid. These days, I am told, those contemptible creatures even smear the traps with the juice of poisonous herbs."
"Pain fades of its own accord, if one simply endures it."
"No. Do not assert that so carelessly."
Even at Victoria's warning, her uncle only tilted his head.
It was understandable enough. Her mother's house, the Walpoles, ranked among the great families of the Empire — a powerful house holding shares in saltpeter mines, and one that had produced no small number of generals. Injured, they had only to request treatment from a saintess. They had no need to suffer pain.
Victoria regarded her uncle with a complicated look for a time, then spoke again.
"Uncle. The truth is, in my first year at the Academy, I was thrown from my horse during riding training."
"Your Highness, why bring that up...?"
"Both my legs broke. ...For the first time in my life, I saw my own bones. The shock made me faint, and when I came to a little later, the wounds were gone. The headmaster had personally brought the Saintess by teleportation and had her treat me."
"......"
"In the end, I have never even properly experienced what pain is. I doubt you are much different, Uncle. One should not speak carelessly of matters one does not understand."
Not that Victoria believed every person ought to enjoy the benefit of equal treatment.
Only three saintesses, chosen by the Heavenly God, could wield holy power at all. The Empire, most prosperous of the nations on the continent, had managed to seat one of them in the Imperial Capital, and most countries could not manage even that. Nor was a saintess's power infinite. Treat two or three of the gravely wounded in succession, and she was spent.
Yes. Reality could not be helped. And yet.
"Easing their pain, at the very least, is my responsibility."
"And that method would be... morphine, I take it."
"It must be introduced in earnest. Seeing the patients at the military hospital today convinced me. And the more I consider it, the clearer it becomes that the operational areas need it even more than the hospital does."
"But if you do that, the Second Princess will... hah. Never mind."
He had been about to say he feared the profit would flow to Sienna.
Victoria understood her uncle's feelings well enough. Should Allan Madoff, that closest of aides, climb into the ranks of the renowned on the back of the morphine trade, Sienna's power would swell along with his. Lending strength to that terrifying girl was by no means to their advantage.
Victoria's own mind, however, did not waver.
"I have already made my decision."
"But that fellow Allan said he was shutting the business down, did he not? If there is no one left to sell us the morphine, where do you mean to obtain it?"
"I will persuade Allan Madoff. Myself."
"......"
Perhaps he sensed that her resolve was fixed, for her uncle pressed no further. The look on his face suggested he still had a great deal he wished to say.
Then again, it isn't as if I have no unease of my own.
Allan Madoff — Sienna's right hand, a man treated as trash even among the knights. Had he truly made the morphine for soldiers wounded in the Empire's service, and to raise the honor of a liege fallen into the gutter? The circumstances suggested as much, but this was not yet the moment for certainty. The price of morphine made that all the truer.
Confirming his sincerity is my part as well.
In truth, turning a blind eye to the patients wailing in the military hospital would not endanger Victoria's position. They were hardly about to rise in riot. Give it a week and the noise would die down somehow. Probably.
But what mattered now was not the contest with her sisters.
Victoria's aim was to secure an essential medicine that would greatly lessen the suffering of the soldiers toiling at the front.
Because someday, that will become my strength.
For that, she was willing to bear a certain measure of sacrifice. No — this was not a thing to be written off as sacrifice at all.
She resolved to act at once.
I had known Victoria would soon fail to bear the pressure and step forward herself. I had expected her as early as tomorrow, come to demand we settle on terms.
...I had not expected her to come like this.
"Sir Allan. Forgive me for calling at so late an hour."
A little past one in the morning. Victoria had come all the way to my house, adjutant and escort knights in tow.
I had been turning over how to arrange the substrate for cultivating psilocybin when the guest arrived unannounced. At the sound of carriage wheels I looked out, saw a coach bearing the imperial crest, and hurried outside to pay the proper respects.
I still can't tell what she's come for. Not yet.
A beauty with golden-blonde hair and blue eyes, her face so impassive that her thoughts were hard to read. Dawn or not, she looked a little tired.
"...Sir Allan, let me be plain. I did not offer you a medal in order to seize the method of making morphine. I simply never imagined a knight of your caliber would prove so accomplished in herbalism as well. I assumed there was someone else. ...Still, it is true that I gave you cause."
"Your Highness, I—"
"I regret it. I made the offer in good faith, but looking back, the situation was more than open to misunderstanding."
"......"
Whether I had misread her goodwill, or Victoria was dressing the matter up, I could not tell.
Either way, she had hardly come only to explain herself. More likely she meant to soothe me and open a proper transaction. Sudden as it was, I had no objection. I called to mind the terms I had already settled on, and waited for her proposal.
A moment later, a question I had not expected fell.
"Sir Allan. I am told you made the medicine for the sake of the wounded. And yet... there is one thing that makes it difficult to take that claim at face value."
"Ask, and I will answer."
"When I looked into it, a single dose was an exceedingly minute quantity. ...At the military hospital, of course, a precise poison-balance can measure out the proper amount. In the field, I should think that impossible. Am I wrong?"
"You are not."
"Then what becomes of a patient who takes too much morphine? Suppose they swallow twenty times the proper dose you set...?"
"They die. Or it may be worse than dying."
"How did you mean to solve that problem? Have you given it any thought?"
To be asked such a thing out of nowhere. Victoria's face was too grave for a vague reply. I would answer her properly, then.
"As soon as the funds were secured, I meant to make it into pills."
"Pills?"
"Yes. Use a component that has nothing to do with the effect — starch, for instance — and press it into pills, and the handling becomes vastly simpler. Even those who are not specialists can manage it, and the danger of an overdose falls as well. The controls would still have to be strict."
Silence held for a while after that answer.
Had she heard what she wanted? A look of relief had come over Victoria. Her eyes eased shut, and her lips moved.
"So he was sincere."
Only after still more time had passed did she open her eyes again.
"Sir Allan."
"Please, speak."
"...There was a time you went about committing vile acts at Sienna's command. It appears you took up herbalism in order to make amends for those wrongs. The fruit of that effort, I suppose, is what allowed you to treat Her Majesty the Empress and to make morphine."
"......"
"I failed to see your true intent and dismissed you out of hand. I even earned the suspicion that I meant to take the method from you. That was plainly my mistake."
The Empire's own princess, acknowledging her fault and going so far as to reflect upon it. That alone was extraordinary, and it did not end there.
She stared at me for a long while, piercing, and at last came to the point.
"I would ask you to give me a chance to make up for that mistake."
"Your Highness."
"Grant it, and I will bring every resource at my command to bear and open for you the road of military supply. I am not proposing this merely to escape some immediate crisis. The Imperial Army needs your morphine."
An explanation. An apology. A proposal.
Her business delivered, Victoria waited for my answer with the trace of a smile.
It was a turn even I had not foreseen.