The Filial Daughter
The one mercy in all of it was that I knew a great deal more about drugs than the villainess did.
The reason, of course, was my little sister.
Choi Yerin worked as an MD under contract with two clubs, and she was nowhere near the level of someone who merely hauled in a few women on a weeknight. Her scale was something else. The clients she cultivated were the ones who spent more than ten thousand dollars at the main table, and she used to say the commission she skimmed off the revenue they generated came to around fifteen thousand a month. She seemed to meet plenty of celebrities, too.
The secret behind a twenty-year-old posting numbers like that was the product. She had been dealing since high school. First year, she grew psychedelic mushrooms—successfully. Second year, she ran ketamine across borders. After that she started supplying the party rooms where high schoolers gathered, ecstasy and liquid cannabis both, with two native-speaker English teachers as her sources.
Even then it had still been small-time, selling to friends. Once she got hired at the club, the scale blew up overnight.
Every kid she had supplied in high school was a silver spoon or a gold one. Yerin dragged those friends in as club clients, and they spawned more of their own kind until she had built a formidable network—formidable enough that the clubs fought one another to scout her. Korea was hardly short of young dealers. What made Yerin frightening was that she was not doing it for the money.
Unlike me, who had cut my parents off, she was still collecting a steady allowance, enough that she could have eaten for the rest of her life without working a day. She simply enjoyed supplying drugs cheap and clean, training people with them, and getting her hooks in.
"One of my clients is a trainee. She got picked up for simple possession. If she'd just dropped my name, they could have talked their way into a non-prosecution recommendation and gone easy on her, but she held out all the way to the end. Can you believe that? She was begging me not to cut her off."
"Yerin. Sooner or later you get caught. Quit, before you regret it."
"I've already got a stand-in lined up for that. A convincing one."
"What."
"I've built it so I can slip out of any situation. Don't worry."
She had said something like that to me once. I let it pass because I couldn't bring myself to throw away my own sister, but it was a moment I badly wanted to cut her loose.
She lived like that until something finally blew up, and then she pinned it on me.
Looking back, she could have dumped it on someone else. I still didn't understand why she had pointed at me. Had she been afraid I would snitch to the prosecutors, or the police? No way of knowing, and it hardly mattered.
I had transmigrated into this body regardless—
"Allan. With this, even our poor Empress ought to be free of her homesickness, don't you think?"
—and the woman smiling in front of me was wicked on a scale Choi Yerin could not touch.
The viciousness was cut from the same cloth as my family's, but Sienna had power to go with it. The kind of power that let her turn a noble-born attendant into a cripple and suffer nothing for it. Even now she was asking my opinion without so much as an honorific for the Empress. Not her birth mother, granted, but still her mother the Empress, and she was cutting the woman down in front of a subordinate.
She'd have her grudges. Of course she would.
Sienna's birth mother had been an ill-fated woman who died not long after her husband became Emperor. Just before he was widowed, the Emperor had taken an exalted princess of the East as his wife—a political marriage, chosen to repair the foreign relations shattered by the war of succession. It had been a cruel thing to do to Sienna, who was only a baby then. And now Sienna and the Third Princess, Anais, the Empress's own daughter, were competing over investiture. It would have been stranger if Sienna felt no resentment toward the Empress.
Even so. This was too much.
"At first I meant to have her smoke it in a pipe."
"That is the usual method. It can also be used as a poultice."
"You know a little, don't you? But it turns out the Empress isn't a smoker. I'd heard that in the East even the children and the women all smoke, so I assumed she did too. I was wrong. And simply brewing it and offering it up would be a little short on dignity."
"So you mixed it into wine."
"Not ordinary wine. Port. An eight-year ruby port, the one she drinks all the time. Probably the only thing this country has produced that the Empress actually loves."
I said nothing to that.
For wine, port ran strong. Sweet enough that you sipped without thinking, and then you were gone. An Empress already sick in the mind and dependent on drink was a sordid enough picture on its own. And she meant to stir opium into it and feed her that?
If it went wrong, even the Emperor—who covered for Sienna without a scrap of sense—was very likely to lose all affection for her. That would be bad for me as well.
I have to stop this. Somehow.
I needed a way to keep the Empress from rotting into an opium addict, and to keep Sienna from opening her eyes to what opium was worth as a product. I started working a scheme in a hurry.
How long the silence lasted, I couldn't say. Sienna's violet eyes were fixed on me, plain as a demand. Spit it out. That was what they said.
Too much. Far too much pressure.
A finely tuned hunting dog. That was the whole of what Sienna had ever thought of me.
Allan Madoff was, at bottom, an exceptional swordsman. The title of knight was itself proof that one's skill was nothing ordinary. This was an early-modern world; muskets and cannon already ruled the army, and in that environment an outstanding knight or mage who could serve as asymmetric force was a very rare thing. But Sienna had not raised Allan and made him her right hand for skill alone. She had done it because he was a man who carried out whatever she ordered without a word of complaint. Add a staff officer's function on top of that, and he became an intimate no one could replace.
Which was not what I wanted.
That was why I was hesitating. To head off a disaster I could already see, I had to offer an opinion, and offer it hard—but drawing Sienna's interest was the one thing I wanted to refuse. It would only make her harder to escape later.
"Looking out for yourself again. You don't have to. ...Maybe I expected too much."
"Your Highness."
"I understand. You're dismissed. I'll call if I need you."
Her estimation of me had dropped, and she jerked her chin: get out. Part of me genuinely wanted to. I couldn't. Feeding opium to the Empress was the one thing I still had to stop.
"Your Highness. Before I withdraw, there is something I must say. Concerning Her Majesty the Empress..."
"Just the Empress."
"...Yes. The Empress. Forgive me, but offering her opium will not benefit Your Highness."
At that, Sienna tilted her head and played the innocent.
"Benefit? I only want to cure her homesickness."
"The homesickness would pass. But the price would be a body that cannot last a moment without opium. Once a week at first. Before long, every three or four days. In the end she would be drinking opium wine day and night."
"Isn't that something we'd have to wait and see?"
"There is nothing to wait for. It is certain. Once she starts, the dose will climb sharply as well. From some point on she will reach for opium not because of what it does, but because the pain of going without it is too great. ...That is the kind of drug it is."
Sienna was silent.
"I believe Your Highness already knows that future."
Even she couldn't quite bring herself to argue. She wouldn't have any concrete knowledge of the side effects. This was a world that didn't even possess the concept of a narcotic. But that heavy use of opium dulled a person—that much, Sienna would know. In all likelihood she had prepared all the harder precisely because of it. And now I, the ignorant knight, had seen through the intent.
She doesn't seem displeased.
I didn't stop. I kept talking.
"As I see it, the Empress is not the target Your Highness ought to be aiming at."
"Why?"
"The Empress, as she is now, has no political power worth the name. She doesn't appear in public to begin with."
"Plenty of people think she doesn't even speak our language."
"What good does it do Your Highness to neutralize an Empress who lives quietly? I believe it would only earn His Majesty's resentment. Should an accident come of the opium, His Majesty will not stay silent."
At that, Sienna's brow creased, faintly.
"An accident, over a little opium? She'd just get a bit dazed. That's going too far."
"No. I will venture a prediction, here and now. Once she begins, she will soon reach the point of waking from sleep to search for opium. Chills, fits of sneezing, and agony in the gut will make it impossible to sleep."
"...Go on."
"Take the opium, and she will sleep easily enough. But after that repeats a few times, there will come a day she does not wake."
"Does Your Highness truly want that?"
Sienna did not argue. She only worried at her chin with slender fingers, turning something over. It had been worth invoking the Empress's death.
Sienna doesn't want the Empress dead.
No—if the woman died, she would be grateful enough. A rival's backing would vanish. She simply would not want to earn the Emperor's hatred over it.
She'd still want to be Crown Princess, for whatever that's worth.
Sienna, finished weighing it, set her expression and looked at me.
"Allan. So what exactly are you proposing?"
"Rather than pickle the Empress in opium, you should treat her. I am not suggesting you help her out of kindness. There is a way to place her in your political debt."
"Seriously. Help her?"
She didn't like it. The reaction I had expected, of course. To hook a Sienna like this, I added one more line.
"...And on top of that, we can shove the reputation of the Third Princess—the Empress's own daughter—straight into the gutter."
Only then did Sienna seem interested. She nodded.
So she really couldn't rest unless she was tormenting someone. I bore the Third Princess, Anais, no particular ill will, but for the girl herself this had to be far better than watching her mother pickled in opium and reduced to a wreck.
"Fine. Let's hear it."
The moment permission fell, I laid out the plan I had just built. A plan to dress Sienna up as a filial daughter.