Self-Reproach
Why did everyone misunderstand Allan?
Even the people who volunteered to follow me are doing this.
Victoria sighed, feeling the bitterness rise. Her faction had always been left to her maternal uncles, Hayden Walpole and Ian Walpole, both of them brigade commanders still in active command. Had they wanted promotion, a field army or a chief of staff's post might have been theirs; they had chosen instead to spend their lives supporting their niece, and she was grateful for it. Now those same uncles were tearing Allan down.
"Madoff Pharmaceuticals means to monopolize the mining rights to the Cobija Silver Lode...! You cannot simply stand by and watch!"
That was the shape of it. More precisely, they were attacking Allan by setting Viscount Granby out in front—a brigadier general of the army—while they themselves only looked on from the side. They had put him up to it. She was nearly certain.
"If you, too, General, are after the concessions in the Great Forest, there is no need to bring it to me. I have no intention of brokering anyone's interests."
"That is not what I wished to say."
"Then what is it?"
"Her Majesty the Empress... appears to be supporting Her Highness Sienna. This is a grave matter."
Victoria held her silence. So this was the heart of it.
The circumstances were suspicious, she had to admit. The moment Sienna met the Empress, the silver-mining rights had passed into her hands, and silver was the good on which trade with Jin turned. It was reasonable enough to conclude that the two of them had struck some bargain. The Empress might well extend still greater favor from here on. Viscount Granby, for his part, looked as though he suspected Allan of standing behind it all.
"Is Allan Madoff not the man who brought the elves down single-handed? And it is common knowledge that Her Majesty the Empress cannot live without psilocybin...! This time, too, Allan Madoff must have goaded Her Highness Sienna into seeking an audience with the Empress!"
By now it no longer sounded like suspicion. It sounded like certainty. Victoria sighed and looked at him.
"And what of it?"
"Your Highness...?"
"Her Majesty may be supporting Sienna as a candidate for crown princess. I regret it. It is not a matter in which I can interfere."
The words left Viscount Granby with a fool's blank face. Victoria's uncles, beside him, wore much the same expression.
"Her Majesty the Empress has Jin at her back. She was a princess of that country to begin with, was she not?"
"What did you say?"
"Your Highness. Do you know how arrogant a nation Jin is? Nine years ago I went there as the military officer attached to a delegation. And at the audience with their emperor, they ordered me, out of nowhere, to kneel...!"
"Viscount Granby."
"No—they did not stop at kneeling. They had me press my forehead to the floor as well... I obeyed before I knew what I was doing, but the humiliation was almost past bearing. And is that the whole of it? Jin calls their emperor the Master of Heaven, do they not? They do not even believe in the God of Heaven!"
What did a little kneeling matter...
No. Honestly, it was humiliating.
What crossed Victoria's mind then was Allan again. Allan Madoff had once knelt before her for the sake of supplying morphine to the army—not even a supply contract, strictly speaking. He had begged leave to offer samples free of charge. Because of it, the wounded had been released from their pain, and these days morphine was being tried, experimentally, even on old veterans dying of malignant tumors.
...There are people who will kneel for soldiers whose faces they have never seen.
And this man was sickened because he had knelt a little before the Emperor of Jin in the national interest. As if that were not enough, he was treating a woman who had lived nearly nineteen years as Empress of the Empire as though she were some foreign power, for no better reason than that she had been born in the East. To hear it from someone ordinarily sensible was enough to make her head spin. Even so, the misunderstanding had to be cleared away first.
"...Viscount Granby. The victory over the elves was Sir Allan's achievement, overwhelmingly so. I do not think it fair to suspect him merely because he secured the rights to a silver mine a little ahead of the rest."
"A mere silver mine? Have you any idea how much materiel ten tons of silver can sweep out of Jin? If Madoff Pharmaceuticals grows any larger, it will be to Your Highness's disadvantage as well...!"
"Sir Allan has earned that much."
"And what good are great merits? His heroin has only made our foreign relations harder. Even the Tourre Republic, at this very moment..."
"If the Empire's diplomats are competent, then even the fear of heroin can be turned to a weapon at the negotiating table."
When Victoria drew the line, Viscount Granby looked somewhat crestfallen. It did not last. Before long he was protesting again, his face full of grievance.
"Why... do you shield Allan Madoff, that vicious man, and not us, who labor for Your Highness? Do you have any notion how many men have been beaten to death with that morningstar of his, or left maimed...?"
Was he truly taking her to task for refusing to take his side? Victoria was dumbfounded. This was not a posture any army general in his forties ought to strike.
This is not something I can soothe away with words.
She hardened her expression and resolved to bring to heel a faction busy slandering Allan. It sat poorly with her, of course. Her support rested, in the end, on maternal uncles, aunts, uncles by marriage, cousins, and the rest, and the greater part of it was the web of military connections who had come to follow her through them. But familiarity was no grounds for indulgence. Now and then they needed to be shown who their liege was.
"Your Highness. I truly, for Your Highness's sake—"
"Viscount Granby. ...No. This is not a reprimand for the general alone. Uncles, you will listen as well."
Hayden Walpole and Ian Walpole flinched. They did not resist.
"...Yes."
Not a request. An order. Only then did the complaints against Allan fall quiet.
"...We are sorry, Your Highness."
Having pressed them this far, they would not try anything foolish. Their attitude toward Allan smacked of pettiness, but she believed the loyalty, at least, was sincere. It was not comfortable, giving orders to men who outranked her on paper... but if it meant protecting Allan, she could bear it willingly. In truth, even this was not enough.
I have to offer Allan my regrets, at the least.
She had failed even to commend a knight who had rendered such service, so paying him a call was only courtesy. No—setting courtesy aside, she simply wanted to. He had achieved so much and met with nothing but unjust obstruction, and the pity of it was almost too much to look at. Victoria did not delay. She acted.
Left behind by their liege, her retainers traded glances, defeat written across their faces.
"I'm sorry, Sir Allan."
A beauty with golden hair and blue eyes had come all the way to my door without warning and offered me an apology. It flustered me more than it pleased me. She was Victoria, the First Princess. The place I lived was a three-story apartment house of the sort mid-ranking officials favored—no destination for royalty, though in truth this was not the first time. When morphine had sparked a riot at the military hospital, Victoria had come in person to apologize then as well. And here she was again, apologizing the moment she saw me.
A woman who can't endure self-reproach. And she isn't even guilty.
She was ever the same. I could tell as much from the uniform alone, fitted so tightly it looked uncomfortable. Her figure was genuinely fine, but the impression was less that she wished to show it off than that she was binding herself in. For a woman who was a princess and, at the same time, nothing more than a field-grade officer, self-control was doubtless a necessity. I did not need to ask why she had come looking for me.
"Not at all, Your Highness Victoria. I resigned myself to rivalry and jealousy from the start."
"Even if there is to be no reward..."
"A title will come soon enough. It has only been postponed a little, at Her Highness Sienna's request. ...And has the company of which I am the majority shareholder not secured the silver-mining rights as well? For an operation that lasted all of three months, the compensation is generous."
"And those rights—did you truly take them because you wanted them?"
I smiled instead of answering, as if to ask why she bothered when she already knew. Victoria's gaze grew more pitying still. A sigh driven out short, a fist clenched tight, irises that would not hold still—that was enough to tell me she was agitated. She must have found me pitiable: wronged, and still only enduring it, checked by the imperial house and jerked about by Sienna. Or perhaps she was sick with self-reproach that her political position would not let her shield me in earnest.
Victoria is probably the only one who looks at me that way.
Best to leave it there and send her off. I was just moving to close the visit and see her out when she suddenly looked away and spoke, as if something weighed on her conscience.
"Sir Allan. It shames me to say it, but there are a great many... people around me who suspect you. The fault is mine. I have managed them poorly."
"I'm not sure I take your meaning."
"But don't worry. I have clamped down on them hard this time. Their regard for me merely runs to excess. They are not wicked men."
So the faction that followed Victoria was moving to check me. Or perhaps it had not stopped at checking—they had been about to try something, and she had stopped them. In truth, it had already smelled wrong from the day one of her uncles came to me and tried to put distance between us.
Will they give it up just because Victoria said a word?
From where I stood, it was likelier they would tell themselves, "Our Highness is too innocent to understand," and hatch something among themselves. That was not a leap. It was simply what excessive loyalty did. All the more so among retainers serving a liege who already had legitimacy and a power base, and had not yet been raised by investiture to the high ground. State, company, or party, it was all the same. Before long they might come for me whether Victoria willed it or not. The one mercy was that she had warned me beforehand.
I shook my head as though it did not trouble me, and spoke.
"I'm quite all right. And please don't think them too petty. To check and suspect what one doesn't understand is human instinct. It is also true that I have done vicious things."
The words were meant, if anything, to make her think them petty—so that if trouble broke, Victoria would take my side rather than her retainers'. Whether the intent had landed, she stared at me blankly. I thought I knew the feeling. I only smiled faintly and nodded.
A long while passed before Victoria climbed into her carriage.
"Go safely, Your Highness."
"...Yes."
She did not take her eyes off me, not to the very end. The moment I had sent her off, I set out for Sienna, to repay the woman who had choked down her temper and even pressed a gift into my hands. It had to be done. Only then would she go on behaving herself.