Syrup
A renunciation of her claim to the throne, and a term of seclusion.
For the Third Princess, Anais, settling the matter at that seemed the best one could hope for. It wasn't personal spite that made me think so.
If it hadn't been for me, Anais would by now be living happily as one half of the lead couple in a romance-fantasy world—a world where a villain turned up now and then, where petty conflicts arose, and where everything was tidied away in the end so the lovers could go back to being sweet on each other. Stepping out of that comfortable world had been Anais's own choice.
She should have gritted her teeth and endured.
If she had kept her head pressed to the floor and simply weathered it, a chance to rise again might eventually have come back to her. The Emperor was still in his forties, hardly an age at which he needed to hurry the naming of an heir. He was, besides, enough of a doting father to have spent years turning a blind eye to Sienna's misdeeds. His affection for Anais was surely no less, and from what I had heard, his relationship with her mother, Yeonhwa, was an excellent one as well.
In the end, it was Anais herself who had thrown the chance away. And I was hardly the only one who thought so.
"Allan. Why do you think Anais withdrew? Oh—and just in case, don't brush me off with some half-hearted dodge."
Sienna's question was openly delighted. I hadn't meant to dodge it in the first place.
"She cut off her own retreat."
"Couldn't she have left because she'd given up on everything and just wanted to live quietly?"
"If that had been her intention, she would have kept her enrollment. Who would dare lay a hand on her if she halted every public activity and shut herself up at the academy? She'd have eaten a few uncomfortable meals under watchful eyes, but she could still have scraped her way to a diploma."
"So you think so too."
Sienna's eyes curved into pleased crescents. She looked thoroughly glad that our thoughts had overlapped—an expression she had been wearing often lately.
There was, however, one difference between us. I had sized the situation up and left it there. Sienna was hoping for Anais's resistance. She wanted her little sister, driven to spite, to put on a show for her. She was already watching Anais from a careful distance.
"Do you know Count Downshire? A man who deals in art on a grand scale."
"He used to be one of Her Highness Anais's close retainers. What has he done?"
"He's become my dog recently. He came to me today with an interesting report. Anais is disposing of her collection—suddenly, and in a hurry. If she weren't plotting something, why go to the trouble?"
"......"
Word that Anais was hastily liquidating her collection. This was on an entirely different plane from ordinary people selling off keepsakes because they needed cash.
She was a princess of the Empire and, at the same time, the granddaughter of the emperor who ruled Jin, the great empire of the East. Every birthday—and sometimes for no reason at all—she received rare and precious gifts. Folding screens of jade. Fans of gold. Thousand-year-old ginseng grown in the shape of a man. That sort of thing. Treasures that would send wealthy men enthralled by the mysteries of the East scrambling with their eyes rolled back in greed. And since they were gifts from that imperial house, one had to assume a premium came attached.
A woman who was, in name at least, a princess should hardly have needed emergency funds. So why liquidate something so precious all at once?
She isn't gathering money for nothing.
Sienna looked convinced the reason was revenge.
"By now she must be out of her mind over the morphine business."
"You believe she'll try to sabotage our business?"
"I have a fair idea of how she'll move."
The developments Sienna anticipated, she said, came down to two. Anais diverting even a portion of the morphine and staging some intrigue with it—or contaminating the morphine itself, the stock held by the military. She seemed certain that Anais's goal was to drag the reputation of morphine, so praised by the soldiers, down into the dirt.
"That's why she raised the funds, isn't it? Bribing the army would take money."
"I'm not so sure, Your Highness. In my view—"
"Ah, never mind. I've already taken measures."
"What sort of measures do you mean?"
"I warned my sister. I told her a great many people envy the military morphine contract, that someone might attempt something unsavory before long, and that she ought to keep a thorough watch. So I hear she's increasing the personnel assigned to managing the morphine, and posting a responsible officer as well."
"If it's Her Highness Victoria, she would."
In other words, the sisters had joined hands to lay a trap for the youngest. Victoria, of course, would not be casting her youngest sister as the enemy. At most she would suspect the apothecaries and opium planters whose interests morphine had stripped away. More than one or two people had taken losses when a customer who used to buy opium by the ton every year—the army—suddenly switched over.
"If Anais gets caught doing something foolish with morphine as her target, my sister will be surprised, I'll grant you. But do you think she'll show leniency just because it's her little sister?"
"She'll think she has to make an example. She may even believe that a severe sanction is the path that serves the Third Princess best."
"Yes. That's the sort of person my sister is."
Sienna lifted a bright, innocent smile. From the look of her, she was simply longing for Anais to commit some folly as soon as possible. Bribing soldiers or military physicians in an attempt to seize the morphine. Stirring some out-of-place something into the stock currently sitting in the supply warehouses. Or else releasing onto the civilian market a counterfeit that shared nothing with morphine but the name.
Whichever it is, it'll be a welcome incident for her. She must be itching for it.
The very tip of her tongue was out, licking at her lower lip. The moment Anais was caught—by any of those routes—she looked ready to collar her and parade her through a grand public shaming. No. Ending at a shaming would be a mercy. A rival for the succession was volunteering to hand her a pretext for the knife. There was no chance this girl would let that pass.
Getting caught quickly would be best for Anais, too.
If she put up a muddled fight and was caught in the middle of it, an irreversible disaster might follow. Then it might be impossible to end things with a mere renunciation of her claim.
"I do hope she puts in a little effort this time."
Sienna, cheering on her little sister. I decided I would hope she didn't try at all.
In any case, whatever Anais did, it would be hard for her not to get caught. She had lost both her faction and her friends. From the very moment she withdrew in order to take revenge on Sienna, Anais's blunder had been foreordained.
If she's aiming at the morphine, there's no way she won't be caught.
And yet—
Even after the net had been cast, no word came at all. Up through the rumor that she had flung her withdrawal papers in the headmaster's face, I had expected her to come charging in with her eyes rolled back. Three days passed in silence. She merely shut herself inside her own palace, as if morphine held no interest for her whatsoever.
"Maybe she's trying to be careful this time?"
Sienna still wore an easy expression.
"She's drawing it out a bit much. She'll move in the end, won't she?"
But by the fourth day, impatience had begun to show.
"What on earth is she trying to do."
By the sixth day the smile had left her face.
"Maybe she decided there was no answer and gave up. She might not care about fighting me, but she wouldn't want to fight Sister Victoria."
Once a week had passed, the mood was close to resignation. She must have gone glum because the guest of honor had failed to appear at a party she had prepared with such care. She would have been swollen with anticipation at the thought of finally getting to pick a fight. Was there another older sister in the world disappointed that her younger sibling refused to start trouble?
Has Anais really given up?
If she had folded revenge and everything else along with it, that would be a mercy. But no matter how I turned it over, I couldn't believe Anais had abandoned the idea. If she had, why withdraw—and why suddenly convert that vast collection into cash? It wasn't as if she had sold it all off and then, struck by a sudden sobering, had the venom knocked out of her.
Then what, exactly, was she trying to do?
What.
As I turned it over, my suspicion suddenly found a place to land, and I reported it to the villainess.
"Your Highness. I believe you've misread the Third Princess's true intentions."
"Hm?"
"The Third Princess has no intention of moving the way we expected. In the end, we've spread a trap in the wrong place and sat waiting."
"You're saying Anais isn't aiming at the morphine?"
"Of course she'll aim at the morphine. Just not in the manner we anticipated."
"......"
Sienna only tilted her head, as if she couldn't make sense of it at all. It wasn't that her intelligence had suddenly failed her. She had simply underestimated a girl of only seventeen who now stood outside the academy.
If it had been the Anais from before psilocybin, she would have been caught at once. But Anais already had the experience of being thoroughly crushed.
"The Third Princess knows well enough that if she loses again this time, she loses everything. Being blinded by revenge doesn't mean she's lost the ability to tell sense from nonsense."
"A girl capable of that kind of judgment withdraws from school just to get revenge?"
"I'm not sure that's something Your Highness is in a position to say."
"That... you're right, Allan."
At least she could look back at herself. That was a relief. She also seemed to accept that Anais might step outside the range she had predicted. She did not look pleased about it.
"So in the end, I dug the trap in the wrong place."
"Yes."
"Then what is it Anais can do—no. What is it she's doing?"
"All she has left now is money, so we need only trace the flow of it. Send people out and learn whether the Third Princess has recently purchased any assets. At a glance, she may have spent the money somewhere that seems to have nothing to do with morphine."
At my request, Sienna put people in motion at once. Those dispatched to gather information were nobles who had recently submitted to her—for the most part nobles in trade who had originally followed Anais. Even though the task was to investigate the very person they had once served, every one of them accepted it without hesitation, or so I was told.
"They'll come back with something before long."
Those words proved true.
The results came back that same afternoon. It meant that if anyone had paid attention instead of letting the matter pass unnoticed, the Third Princess's movements could have been grasped long before. Regret, however, came too late.
"Her Highness Anais has purchased a factory near the Imperial Capital. A factory that makes syrup. She acquired it a week ago already. Lately, I'm told, apothecaries have been coming and going from that factory with unusual frequency."
The Third Princess had acquired a syrup factory. At first hearing, it was such an incongruous piece of news that even I couldn't find the thread of it. But before long my head went cold. I had begun to guess, concretely, what Anais meant to do.
Syrup.
Things were about to get very dirty.