The Dose Takes Hold
"Are you satisfied?"
The words left my mouth the instant I had swallowed two of the dummy pills in a row.
The Third Princess only let out a low groan. So she still hadn't broken.
"Not enough for you, then. …Yes. I understand."
I swallowed another.
Anais glanced hurriedly around the room, as if hunting for reinforcements, but no one took her side. They were all too busy reading which way the wind blew. I understood. Honestly — who was going to help her in a situation like this?
"Still not enough? Very well."
I tasted one more, just to tighten the pressure.
Only then did a reaction come.
Third Princess Anais's scream tore through the audience chamber.
A moment ago she had still been holding her composure; now even that seemed beyond her. Those doll-like features twisted into something ugly, and her cheeks burned red. In that instant it truly struck me that she was a seventeen-year-old first-year at the Academy.
You really shouldn't have rushed in so carelessly.
If I had been Anais's adviser, I would never have let her step forward herself. I would have secured only the medicine that could serve as evidence, then set the rumor loose first — that Second Princess Sienna had tried to feed the Empress jimsonweed. That way, even if things went wrong later, the backlash would have been lighter. But Anais had insisted on operating on her sister with her own hands.
I could only be grateful for that innocence.
This was more entertaining than I had expected. Why hadn't I thought of a method like this sooner?
Sienna Carlyle, Second Princess of the Britannia Empire, was fighting to keep a laugh from leaking out in little bursts. In all her nineteen years she had never worked her facial muscles this hard. She had rarely needed to watch anyone else's mood in the first place. She had put on an act before, to deceive her father the Emperor and her half-sisters, but even then it had never been this difficult.
The scene her escort knight, Allan Madoff, had staged was that extraordinary.
"Sir Allan. Poisoning? Her Highness Anais never said any such thing…!"
"If not that, then what? And why else would I have tasted it?"
"Such impiety! Is this man even fit to serve as an escort knight?"
Allan Madoff met Anais's retainers — now raising a fuss, far too late — without so much as a crease in his expression. At a glance he was the very image of an escort knight straining to shield his liege.
So he had a talent like this.
He was a friend who had occasionally provided her with a fine spectacle before.
Three months ago.
There had been trouble at a gambling den Sienna owned under another name. Insolent bastards, impersonating the military police, had tried to shake the place down for money. They had done it without knowing the establishment was hers, but that was no excuse. So she had ordered Allan, the most trustworthy of her people, to handle it. Handling, in the end, meant killing them as an example.
The way Allan had dealt with the impostors then had been rather impressive.
"Fight each other. I'll spare only the one who wins."
"I'm not lying. Think about it. I am an escort knight in service to Her Highness the Princess. If I get the flesh of lowborn trash like you on my morningstar, all that waits for me afterward is the trouble of cleaning it. I have no desire to volunteer for that labor."
"Flies like you aren't exactly rare. I'll kill one of you as a warning and let the other go, so get started."
Taken in by those words, the impostors had fought a bloody duel to the death — inside the iron cage where the dogfights usually broke out. After a gruesome brawl one of them died, and Allan brought his morningstar down on the skull of the survivor, who was howling that he keep his promise. It had been far more entertaining than any ordinary dogfight.
Not bad. But it doesn't compare to this.
The toys Allan was playing with now were not petty criminals scrabbling at the bottom. They were Third Princess Anais, and the nobles who followed her. Marquis Rikierman, a principal shareholder of Higgins Bank. Baron Agers, who had built a considerable fortune on trade with the East. Earl Soan, chairman of the stock exchange. And others of their kind. Every one of them a noble who had attached himself to Anais's line.
They did not seem to have come knowing the details. Anais had probably summoned them, and they had shown up without much thought. But Sienna had no intention whatsoever of letting those nobles off. She meant to bundle them all as one lot and torment them for a long time under the charge of lèse-majesté.
They shouldn't have lined up behind her.
After letting the moment hang, Sienna slowly approached the pale Anais.
"Anais, I'll make this clear, right here. I never used anything like jimsonweed. Do you believe me now?"
"I… I did verify it."
"Did you do this because you got a tip from some knight named Bono? How unfortunate. That man was caught going around the palace spreading slander about me."
"…"
The moment Bono's name came out as well, Anais finally shut her mouth. It was an admission that this was no longer something she could handle on her own.
"So in the end you believed the ravings of a knight who'd lost his mind, and tried to frame me."
Sienna stared straight at her beloved half-sister. Until a few years ago almost no one had seriously regarded Anais as a contender for the throne, but that was no longer true. Young as she was, she had quietly, bit by bit, gathered her own people and succeeded in building a base of support.
She doesn't measure up to my elder sister, but she's ahead of me.
But that good reputation of Anais's ended today. She had raised a poisoning conspiracy in front of dozens of witnesses and been made a fool. This was not the sort of thing that could be buried by hushing it up — and Sienna had never intended to let it be buried in the first place. If they had been sisters that fond of each other, this situation would never have unfolded at all.
"What am I supposed to do, Sister?"
Anais, raising the white flag at last.
Sienna smiled brightly and told her, for the time being, to shut her mouth and keep it shut. The half-sister, grown obedient, did as she was told.
Some time had passed, and the foul taste of the dummy pills still hadn't left my mouth.
Still better than downing the hallucinogenic mushrooms.
The hallucinations those mushrooms produced were on the level of LSD. Take a proper dose and you only drifted through a sense of floating and happiness before it ended, but overeat and there was no predicting what might happen. I might strip off my uniform and sprint naked through the Imperial Palace, or giggle my way into the catastrophe of caving in Sienna's skull. That was why I had prepared fakes for the tasting — though I hadn't expected to eat this many.
At least the result had turned out well. That was a relief.
"I'll be back, Allan."
Sienna, walking alone and unashamed into the Empress's office, was the proof of it. The Empress, briefed on the sordid farce her daughter was tangled in, had given the order herself.
"Have Sienna admitted at once. I am pleased the medicine was prepared. I shall take it now."
She had probably wanted, somehow, to clean up the mess her own daughter, the Third Princess, had made. Even in that plantlike state of hers, a bare minimum of maternal feeling seemed to remain.
Of course, cleanup of that sort was impossible. One member of the direct imperial line had tried to inflict a wretched slander on another of the blood, and it had gone wrong. There was no way to pass through this unscathed. Even I, whose mother had made her living as a political broker, couldn't think of a clear way out.
Did she know that reality? Anais simply sat there, slumped, with a vacant look on her face. She didn't come over to try to win me, and she didn't discuss countermeasures with her retainers.
In this moment, her wish could only be one thing. That the medicine I had made, and Sienna had offered, would produce no effect at all. Perhaps she even hoped it would bring on some mild complaint. If the Empress took the psilocybin and so much as retched, a hole would open somewhere through which Anais might still slip free.
That isn't going to happen.
After some thirty minutes had passed, a tune broke the silence. Ding-di-ding-ding, di-ding-ding. The sound came from within the Empress's office, her private rooms. The Third Princess and her retainers, sunk until then in gloom, each began to cock their heads. A moment later a maid opened the office door, and the question answered itself.
"Her Majesty the Empress…?"
A delicately built woman of the East was playing a seven-string zither. The player was, of course, Empress Yeonhwa.
Her skin was pale enough to make most white people look ruddy by comparison, and even though this was a gathering to receive her daughter, there wasn't a trace of makeup on her face. I could guess how she usually lived. She probably never went out at all. But now she was playing the seven-string zither with a bright, clear expression — an impossibly difficult piece, improvised, without a score. In the midst of it she caught sight of the Third Princess, stunned speechless, and even flashed her a glad little smile.
"Have you come?"
"Y-Your Majesty."
"Be still for me. I am looking upon the sound, and you are in the way."
"No — this is hardly the time. …Wait. Did you say you were looking upon the sound?"
"Quiet!"
Whether encouraged by the larger audience or not, the Empress began to play with even greater passion. That face, lost in ecstasy. She seemed already to have entered a mysterious, many-colored world of synesthesia, where she saw sound and heard color.
"Are you truly all right!?"
The Third Princess pressed her urgently, as if she still couldn't let go of her hope. Wishing something were wrong with her own mother. Unlike the filial Sienna, it was a rather inappropriate attitude. If the Empress were truly satisfied, Anais's position would only grow worse, so I understood — but still.
The Empress neatly betrayed her daughter's expectations.
That was what psilocybin did. You saw hallucinations, and at the same time you became intensely sociable, intensely willing. Back home, people who had studied themselves into depression often used it as a booster when they threw a party. Before they knew it, they had turned outgoing.
"Even so."
"Do you happen to be hoping I am not all right?"
"…No."
"Then that settles it! No more of that."
The Empress's expression turned solemn, and her long, slender fingers began to move even more busily. I was a layman and couldn't tell, but something bright and thumping — dum, dum, dum. Her mouth was smiling as she played it, yet moisture had gathered at the corners of her eyes. On top of that, she was gazing at somewhere with a wistful look.
Was it a piece she used to play before her family when she was young? She might have been recalling a childhood in which her parents praised her for how well she played, and she beamed. A pure time, when there had been no need even to think of difficult politics.
"Ha ha!!"
The performance grew merrier and merrier. The Third Princess, too — perhaps moved by her mother's playing — suddenly burst into tears.
Everyone looked happy. I was truly glad.