Reputation
The Grand Hall of the Imperial Palace doubled as a gallery, and for that reason it served the nobility as their drawing room.
"Doesn't Her Highness Sienna seem a little changed?"
The words came first from a noble who had been lingering at the edges of the hall.
At first, everyone only rolled their eyes. The name Sienna was simply too heavy to pick up in company like this. In the cheap taverns the middle and lower sorts frequented, she was torn apart as a matter of course—the Second Princess snatched vagrants for sport and tortured them to death, she set beastkin slaves on one another and watched the fights, she would be packed off abroad any day now. Blasphemies of that kind passed back and forth without a second thought. Among the nobility, however, at least in public, the prevailing custom was to keep the Second Princess off one's tongue. Get caught, and there would be retaliation.
That unspoken rule had just been overturned.
The nobles who had spent a while only reading the room soon began to run their mouths, as if they had been waiting for someone to breach the dike.
"I had it in confidence from the chief chamberlain. Yesterday His Majesty was presiding over council when he let his tears show. He must have suffered so much on account of Her Highness Sienna—perhaps it all welled up at once?"
"He wept because he was moved? Even so, that's going rather far."
"His Majesty has always been unusually soft where the Second Princess is concerned, hasn't he? Last year—you remember, don't you? After the Founding Day ceremony he caught hold of Her Highness Sienna and all but begged her. Ah. Was I not supposed to say that?"
"You've already said it. A bit late to worry."
Nobles, rejoicing that the Emperor's long-standing headache had at last been resolved.
"They paid twenty-five million thalers! For a mere twenty-five kilograms!"
"That morphine? It won't last. I reckon its value was inflated because the patients rioted at the military hospital. Honestly, when those tea leaves first came in from the East—the white orchid tea—it was the same uproar, wasn't it? The moment the fashion passes, the bubble bursts."
"Don't be a fool. I've heard things, and this is nothing to compare with tea. For all we know, this is the floor. I need to find a way in, and quickly...!"
"Isn't it just opium with something stirred in?"
"Then make some yourself."
Nobles, chattering over morphine priced two hundred times higher than the same weight of opium.
"They say Sir Allan staked his very life to plead with Her Highness the Second Princess. That if things went on like this, only expulsion from the imperial house and exile awaited her—and that of course, even if she were banished, he would follow her to the end and serve her with a loyal heart, but that he would rather help her escape her infamy."
"Oh my. So that's why Her Highness Sienna's heart was moved...!"
"...Allan Madoff isn't that sort of man."
"What would you know about Sir Allan? They say he's the one who made the morphine—how brilliant must he be? He had his reasons. He must have been watching for his chance all these years."
And then the noblewomen, gossiping about the escort knight Allan Madoff, who had devoted himself to hauling his liege out of the mire. Among them was a matron who testified that she had seen Allan Madoff kneel before Her Highness Sienna and speak plainly to her, and that it had been truly moving. Naturally, no one spoiled the mood by questioning whether the testimony was worth believing.
"Actually, a friend of mine is an alchemist, and he collaborated closely with Sir Allan while he was researching the morphine."
"Truly?"
"It was all conducted in such secrecy that he kept it hidden until now, but that hardly matters anymore, does it? I hear he's still in regular contact with Sir Allan."
If anything, quite a few of them were inventing their contributions on the spot.
Sienna. Morphine. Allan. At present, they were the most fascinating subjects in the Imperial Capital—fascinating enough that even those who regarded Sienna and her right hand, Allan, as trash kept at least one ear open.
"Her Majesty the Empress approaches!"
With the unannounced appearance of Empress Yeonhwa, whose comings and goings had grown markedly busier of late, the nobles' murmuring paused. It did not pause for long.
"My daughter's head for business is hardly ordinary, wouldn't you say? ...Ah. The second one."
Even the Empress had readily set Sienna on the table as a topic. After that, the nobles had nothing left to restrain them. Rather, some began talking Sienna up for the sake of keeping company with the Empress. There was no shortage of people eager to look well before a woman who could scatter privileges with a flick of her hand.
Bit by bit, public opinion of the villainess was shifting.
Four more days had passed since the delivery of twenty-five kilograms of morphine.
Peaceful. So far.
That was only how it looked to me. Somewhere, the first signs were surely already showing. There would be physicians and nurses tasting a sour deprivation as they administered such expensive morphine to their patients, and patients who ought by now to be cutting their doses and entering the taper, yet still cried that they were in pain and begged for more. But nothing had broken the surface yet. I had already written out the dosing instructions, so there was no further room for me to intervene.
Thanks to that, I had briefly taken my hands off the morphine business, and these past few days I had been enjoying a rare stretch of ease.
Most of that time went into sparring.
The original owner of this body was a knight who had been drilled to a high standard. Perhaps because of that, even when I shut myself in the workshop my limbs itched more often than not, and the restlessness only settled after I forced out a spare hour to cross weapons with Bono. I didn't particularly want to. It was necessary all the same. Once you were in business, there was no telling what might come of it.
So this time I squared myself to it and put real hours into training. I had returned my sword to Sienna, and so I took up the morningstar. My partners were the knights who guarded her alongside me.
Sienna ran more than one enterprise, and by the nature of that work her knights were often pressed into duties beyond escort. Roughing up customers who made a scene at the gambling den. Beating delinquent debtors until they coughed the money back up. None of them were trash on my level, but every one of them stood some distance from the picture of an honorable knight. They didn't say so, but the grievances must have piled up. And now that Sienna had suddenly turned good, they seemed to find the feeling a strange one.
"Um, Senior. Has Her Highness Sienna truly changed?"
The question came from Erica, a year my junior, the moment the bout ended. The other knights pretended not to listen while stealing glances my way.
"What do you mean by that?"
"The work we used to be given—well, I'm not sure it deserves to be called work—has vanished, and honestly, it's making me anxious. We're on standby all day."
"Then wait until an order comes down. No need to weigh yourself with it."
"That's just it. I keep wondering what sort of command might come. The quiet makes me more uneasy."
The knights weren't fretting over nothing. The dogfighting den Sienna had run since before she came of age was being wound down toward closure, and the loan company she had kept as a pocket-money venture had changed its methods. Instead of beating debtors half to death, they were now to be gently talked around.
She doesn't find the other businesses amusing anymore. That woman, either.
I understood Sienna. The knights who had suddenly lost their make-work would not. Some of them probably hoped she had genuinely become kind. Unfortunately, I couldn't answer that hope.
"Sounds like you'd rather live the way the knights who serve the other princesses do."
No one answered.
"The knights who serve Her Highness the First Princess are often sent on military operations, I hear. You'd have to accept the danger, but there's a chance to build merit, and in some cases even a decoration. For a knight, there's no greater honor."
"Well... that's true."
"And the knights under Her Highness the Third Princess... I don't know about now, but until recently they were called up for ceremonial duty often enough, weren't they? Her Highness never missed an imperial function, and she showed her face in society all the time."
"So now Her Highness Sienna will be like that too...!"
"Don't expect that much."
I had no wish to string them along with false hope, so I cut it off clean.
It was true that Sienna had sheathed her claws. These days she was even playing the darling with the Empress, who shared not a drop of her blood. But that wasn't because her nature had changed. It was because she had grown cleverer. She had simply decided to feed her sadism without damaging her own interests.
The rational view is that she'll start again the moment she gets the chance.
I looked slowly over the crestfallen knights, then spoke again.
"You'd be better off hoping this quiet stretch lasts as long as it can."
Again, no one spoke.
"Throwing yourself into training in the yard, standing a watch every few days, working quietly—that's the good part. Expect too much of Her Highness, and you'll only suffer for it later."
"Yes, Senior."
I went back into the spar with my junior, the bitterness plain on her face.
A bout close to real combat, save that we weren't using aura. A sword-point driving in at my throat, the morningstar I swung after slipping it by a hair, and now and then the bright shock that ran up my hands when the weapons met. Healthier work than my actual trade. And there was a gain besides: I no longer hesitated to swing a blunt weapon at someone else's skull.
At first I would flinch without meaning to and get beaten hollow. Repeated sparring had let me strip that hesitation out. I knew they were skilled enough to defend themselves somehow. Swing it at someone without that skill and there would be an accident, but for now I could only hope that didn't happen.
This isn't bad, either.
My body was a little tired, but I hadn't had a day this peaceful in a long while. The villainess was behaving herself, and the morphine supplied to the army still seemed to be used only as a painkiller. Even after I had made a fortune, no one came clinging with their troubles. My accumulated infamy, no doubt.
How long this idle stretch would last was anyone's guess. I wasn't impatient. I already knew the peace would end soon. It wouldn't even be strange if something blew up tomorrow.
"Sir Allan. Have you heard?"
The corridor leading to the office. A servant who had been whispering with the others turned, all at once, to look at me.
Not tomorrow, then. Today. I took it as given and asked what had happened, and the answer came back.
"Her Highness Anais submitted her withdrawal to the Academy today...!"
Word that the Third Princess, who had been grimly holding on all this time, had finally dropped out. I would have liked it if she had withdrawn because she wanted a quiet life. There was no chance of that.
I had learned it by living through it: the princesses of the Empire were exceptionally good at staying busy.