Anais
"Your Highness. Have you truly set your heart on this?"
The question came from the academy's chancellor, white-haired with age, his hands folded neatly before him. Anais answered with nothing but a sigh.
Imperial princess or not, it was a breach of courtesy. The chancellorship was a post accorded the treatment of a minister, and the man who held it was, before he was steward of the academy, a mage in his seventies—an elder of the craft. Even so, Anais had her excuse. He had already said the same thing seven times.
Are you truly resolved, might you consider it once more, this judgment is far too hasty, there is always re-enrollment, though you would find it hard to settle back in... He strung out that same airless counsel, laboring to turn her mind.
Relentless, this old man.
He meant, no doubt, to hold the withdrawal and sound out the imperial will. He would not want it said that a princess had left the academy because it had failed to look after its students. That was the last thing Anais wanted. Better, she thought, to put an end to it here.
"Chancellor. My mind is already made up."
"Your Highness, your difficulties have of course been many, and yet—"
"And you mean to tell me that hard times soon pass?"
"...Heh."
"I thought the same, at first. I believed that if I kept my head down and endured, the misunderstanding—that I had tried to pin a poisoning on my sister—would fade on its own."
Anais had meant to hold out, in the beginning. Reality had not been so obliging. No one poured open loathing on her, of course. That did not make it hurt any less. Classmates and seniors who had once hovered at her elbow, hungry for so much as a word, began by degrees to keep their distance, and the friends in the club she had joined for companionship found roundabout ways to suggest she withdraw. For Anais, long accustomed to being loved, the slow isolation among her peers was torture enough.
"...Chancellor. The truth is, there was a friend I had been close with from the day I enrolled. Close enough that we dropped formality in private."
"Your Highness...?"
"Then, the moment the scandal broke, she started speaking to me with full courtesy. I asked why she had changed so suddenly, and she would not answer at all. ...After I pressed her for a long while, do you know what she said? That she had no wish to be a human shield."
"Good heavens!"
"Three houses were stripped of their titles because of me, so I can hardly blame her. Do you see, now, what I have become in their eyes?"
"I... have nothing I can say."
"Exactly. Words fail, and that is why I chose to withdraw. I have no desire to watch anything uglier. I would be grateful if you simply processed it."
"......"
Even after all that, the chancellor still dithered. He was afraid, no doubt, of an uncomfortable word from the Minister of Education, or from someone higher still. For a man of such renown, he was remarkably timid.
"No harm will come to the academy. I am leaving of my own will. Who would punish you for that?"
"That is not the reason."
"It is, though. Please, leave it there."
At that, the chancellor could not bring himself to answer, and looked away.
Anais knew well enough that driving at the heart of a matter was no courtesy. Other people were not fools; they chose polished phrasing because they understood that reddening a man's face bought them nothing, and so they restrained themselves.
I don't have the luxury of minding that.
Fortunately, it was precisely that which let her end the dreary withdrawal interview.
"Then... very well. Your Highness."
"Thank you."
In the end the chancellor signed the papers. Anais paid him the courtesy his plain dismay was due, and left the office.
At last she was free of her place as a student. The thought that it was truly over brought a strange swell of feeling. Odd, that. She had not even finished a single term—why should it sit so heavily? Of late she had barely attended at all, too busy thrashing in the trap Sienna had laid.
I'm only unsettled. That's all.
She took a last turn about the grounds, sorting the tangle of it. What caught the eye, inevitably, were the students. Natural enough, perhaps, but the academy was thick with couples—so many that one might have thought they had enrolled for no purpose but to fall in love. A pair strolled the grounds with a strawberry sherbet apiece; another seemed, at a glance, to be squabbling, though honey all but dripped from the looks they traded; and beneath the willow grown at the lakeside, a couple stood face to face, fidgeting as if shy.
Easy days, the lot of them.
She was cynical now, but had it not been for Sienna's games, she might well have joined that procession herself. There had, in truth, been a second-year she had watched with interest until only recently—a curious senior, teetering on failure as a first-year, who had suddenly begun to show a startling gift for the sword once he advanced. At the start of term she had marked him merely as a useful talent to bring into her camp, but as time passed, fondness had stolen in. Remembering it now was, of course, useless.
"Right. Time to go."
She forced the thoughts aside and climbed into the carriage. What mattered now was nothing so trivial as love.
The moment she withdrew, the person Anais went to was, of course, her mother—Empress Yeonhwa. With her name dragged into the gutter by the poisoning conspiracy, her faction seized by Sienna, the empress was the only one left to lean on in that wretched pass. Unlike the eight nobles who had gone scurrying to Sienna, she was an ally with no likelihood of betrayal. Surely she would not cast off her own daughter.
"How sore is your heart? You need not say a word. I know."
"...Mother."
And indeed, the instant the empress saw her, she caught Anais's hand and held it fast. Anais had vexed her sorely of late over the psilocybin, and yet she seemed to bear no grudge.
She won't cast me off. Not that, at least.
She did not look likely to stand as a firm ally, either. Having soothed her daughter with warmth, the empress presently said something quite aside from the moment.
"But, daughter. You must not set your mind on harsh measures. Do you hear?"
"Mother. What are you suddenly—"
"Only listen. I am sorry to say it, but Sienna is a keener child than you. And the one called Allan, who attends her, seems cleverer than the parasites still clinging at your side. Strain yourself after reprisal, and you alone will be hurt."
To her daughter, this side of the empress felt only strange. The empress Anais remembered had been a woman forever shut away in her bedchamber—a melancholy woman steeped in homesickness, forever hungering for news of her homeland. To be with her was to feel oneself sag in sympathy. Anais had thought of her less as a guardian one might lean upon than as someone to be tended with affection. But the empress, her vigor restored, was sharper than she had imagined. For all her delicate looks, she possessed a coldness as well.
"I know the nobles who followed you have broken away. By the look of things, they follow Sienna now."
"That bitch Sienna must have threatened them—!"
"That, too, is possible. The child has a sly and violent bent."
"What?"
"But what matters is that the threat took hold, does it not? It means the nobles fear Sienna far more than they fear you. Were it otherwise, dread of your reprisal alone would have kept them from changing camps so lightly."
"......"
If only that cold clarity might be turned toward helping her take revenge on Sienna. There could be no stauncher support. Regrettably, it did not seem likely. The very person who had given the empress a life worth living was that cunning bitch, Sienna. These days the two of them seemed unable to live without each other.
Even so—when it actually comes to it, won't she take my side?
They were blood. However one looked at it, they were kin. The hope kept sprouting, stubbornly. But the empress seemed to read even that. She shook her head, slow and certain, as if to say there was not the slightest chance, and clicked her tongue.
"Anais. Even now, you look upon your sister as an enemy."
"......"
"But to my eyes, it is not so. ...A false charge of poisoning? Had the like arisen in the land where your mother once lived, the ministers caught up in it would have had their three kindreds exterminated. You might have kept your life, yet your title would have been stripped away, and you would have lived out your years in some lonely place of exile."
Three kindreds—what? It was a thing the empress could say only because she was a princess of the Jin Empire: a hegemonic power of the east, boasting a strength several times that of the Britannia Empire. They said it was a fearsome place, where a clan might be slaughtered to the last not even for treason, but for a few impious phrases written into an edict. They said, too, that anyone who married into the imperial house lived with half a life already offered up.
Asking Mother for help is impossible, then.
If a fight broke out, she would scold a little at most, then step back. In the worst case, she might even aid that bitch Sienna on the quiet.
This was not counsel. It was, in effect, a notice. The moment she felt it anew—that she had lost her reputation, her followers, and her mother's protection, all of it. Once she had recognized the cold reality, her heart grew easier instead. Anais forced a smile and nodded.
"I understand, Mother."
"Can you promise me?"
"Yes. This much, I'll promise. At the very least, I won't do anything to harm that bitch Sienna... no, Sister Sienna. Of course, if she tries to kill me first, I'll answer it. You aren't about to say even that is forbidden, are you?"
"Of course you may. You are my daughter, are you not?"
Only then did the empress nod, as if satisfied. It was a smile of such fresh clarity that it was hard to believe she was a woman in her late thirties. For a moment, the thought even crossed Anais that she did not want to betray that smile.
But she had no confidence she could keep her promise to her mother. She would not aim at Sienna directly, yet she had not the slightest intention of laying revenge aside. She had already marked a target.
Madoff Pharmaceuticals, the venture in which Sienna had joined as an investor. Anais meant to strike it. It was the morphine trade that had lifted, if only a little, the reputation Sienna had been sunk in the mire. These days, go where one would, and it was morphine and nothing else. To think that wicked bitch had claimed both the coin and the honor sent the blood rushing backward in her veins.
Even so, it was not simple fury and envy that had set her sights on the morphine.
I have to strike now.
Leave them be, and that pair would only grow richer and stronger. Miss this moment, and there might not even be a chance to attack. The plan was laid, and she had no thought of taking it back. All that remained to her now was the hunger for revenge.