Would My Body Be Enough?
"Really… would my body be enough?"
That night, after they returned to the castle, Esran's chambers bustled with voices for the first time in a long while.
The young ladies who had grown up sharing the same pot of rice since childhood sprawled across the bed and cushions without a care for decorum. They were daughters of a poor nation, so their clothes were plain — but their mouths were anything but.
"Your Highness! Is it true? Did the Grand Duke of the North really say he'd buy our entire stock of textiles—"
"Five gold coins a bolt! Five! Does that even make sense?"
Rina splayed her fingers wide and squealed. Betty, sitting beside her, smacked the hand down.
"Ugh, shut up, you're spitting. But wait — how much was our national debt again? At that rate, we could pay off half of half and still have some left—"
"Hey, is money really what matters right now?"
Mia, the sharpest tongue in the room, scooted right up against Esran with glittering eyes.
"That's not the important part. Your Highness, be honest. The Grand Duke of the North… he has feelings for you, doesn't he? Right!?"
"F-feelings? What nonsense are you talking about."
"Then why else would that terrifying man come all the way to a country that isn't even on the map and just toss a fortune at us! If that isn't love, what is it!"
Mia pressed a hand to her chest and closed her eyes with theatrical solemnity.
"Ahh, 'I shall take your nation under my wing.' Kya. A bard needs to turn this into a song."
"She's lost it, she's completely lost it! That is one hundred percent a romance-novel male lead line!"
"Should I tip off a bard? This is going to become oral legend at this rate!"
Rina clutched a pillow and shrieked.
Esran's face went up in flames.
"Th-that's not it! You know what kind of man he is, and you still—"
"Aww, Your Highness is dodging again."
Mia jabbed Esran in the side.
"You think we don't know? You two were stuck alone in a carriage for days. Ooh, look at her blushing, she's bright red!"
"I-I said it's not!"
Giggles spilled through the chambers until the whole room was drowning in laughter.
But Esran could not laugh.
Among her giddy friends, her expression alone sank lower and lower.
Something felt wrong. Deeply wrong.
"…No."
Soft. But firm enough that the laughter cut off at once.
"Your Highness……?"
Mia blinked.
Esran drew her knees to her chest. The thought that had been crushing her since the carriage finally slipped out of her mouth.
"No matter how I look at it, he has no reason to show us kindness. That terrifying man… would never give us something for free."
"Th-then why—"
"…Leverage."
Her voice trembled.
"He's going to use this as leverage and demand something later. Load us with a debt we can never repay… and take the whole country into his hands."
In an instant, the chambers went silent.
Even Rina, who had been squealing into a pillow, and Betty, mid-debt calculation, closed their mouths.
Thinking about it, that made the most sense. A monster did not give things away for free.
The color drained from every young lady's face.
The next day, I pulled a hood low over my face and left the castle alone.
Officially, I was "getting some air." When a servant nearly had a heart attack trying to follow, I shut it down with a single word.
We were going to be staying a few days anyway. I needed to know how this country actually worked. Buying up their textiles was not going to be the end of it.
But the moment I started circling outside the castle walls, it was far worse than I had expected.
The fields were withered to dust. Abandoned farmland with not even a trace of tilling stretched on without end.
At the mouth of an alley, a child sat crouched. An empty bowl sat beside him as he stared blankly at the road.
He looked up at me in my hood and asked, without a shred of fear,
"…Mister, are you moving away too?"
"…Moving?"
"Everyone who passes through here is moving. The house next door left. The one after that left too."
The child said it like it was the most natural thing in the world. Leaving was just daily life in this neighborhood.
A little farther on, I spotted a cart piled high with belongings. A young man was lashing down a heap of worn household goods.
"…Leaving, then."
"Yes. We can't hold on here any longer."
He answered without stopping his hands. To a hooded stranger, there was nothing left worth hiding.
"The land is dead. You sow seed and nothing sprouts — what else can you do? All the young ones are heading for the capital… and all that's left are the old. In ten years, there won't be a human shadow left in this country."
He spat the words out and heaved the last of his load onto the cart.
Empty houses. Departing carts. A child sitting in the road.
I had thought this was simply a poor country because its textiles wouldn't sell. It wasn't. This place was withering away wholesale.
Then, by the river, I met an old man.
He sat on the cracked riverbed with an empty fishing rod cast into nothing. Not a drop of water in the river.
"…This used to be a river, then."
The old man looked up at me with cloudy eyes. He couldn't have seen my face under the hood, so he must have taken me for just another traveler passing through.
"It was a river. Ten years ago, it was full of water. We caught fish. We irrigated the fields."
"So what happened."
"It started when the dam upstream collapsed. The whole waterway twisted, and every field downstream dried up and died. No one left to fix it, no money to fix it with… so everyone just leaves, like this."
The old man left his rod dangling over the waterless river and gave a hollow little laugh.
"But I was born and raised here. Where else would I go?"
The dam.
I stopped talking for a moment.
In the original story, how this country eventually came back to life. What the first step had been.
…I remembered.
Just reverse the waterway, and these dead fields would live again. The people who left would come home, and fish would hang on that empty rod once more. In the original, someone finally managed it much later.
…But it doesn't have to be much later, does it?
It was in my own interest anyway. If this country survived, the textiles I had agreed to buy would keep coming steadily.
I started tallying, in my head, the manpower and materials I could pull from the North.
The old man just stared blankly at me. He had no way of knowing why a hooded stranger was so absorbed in the story of a collapsed dam.
That evening, the banquet the country had prepared was sparse.
It was a shabby hall barely worthy of being called a banquet room. A few candlesticks burned sparsely along the walls, and the corners the light couldn't reach lay drowned in shadow.
On the long table: a single bowl of thin soup and a few pieces of coarse bread. That seemed to be everything this nation could set before a "distinguished guest."
Ashamed of the meager spread, the servants pressed themselves to the walls and could not lift their heads.
And at either end of that long table —
The Grand Duke of the North sat at the head. Far away at the opposite end sat Esran.
What filled the space between them was not food, but silence.
Esran could not bring herself to touch her meal.
The soup was going cold, but she could not even lift the spoon. She had no idea when the man at the far end might bring up his "leverage."
The young ladies seated beside her strained desperately to warm the air somehow.
The same girls who had sprawled across the bed giggling that afternoon now sat with ramrod-straight backs, fingertips trembling.
As always, Mia was the first to speak.
"Y-Your Grace! O-our country's soup is actually rather well known out on the border. D-does it… does it suit your taste……?"
The end of her voice frayed thin.
The Grand Duke did not answer. He simply lifted his spoon with one hand and took a single mouthful of soup.
Every gaze in the hall hung on the tip of that spoon.
Slowly. Very slowly, he parted his lips.
"…Passable."
A short word.
But those two syllables dropped the temperature of the hall like a stone.
Mia's face went deathly pale. Rina froze mid-inhale. Even Betty's hand locked around her cutlery.
Passable.
Did that mean he disliked it? Or was he mocking this pitiful spread — mocking the entire country?
A chill ran down Esran's spine.
I knew it. This isn't kindness. All of this is just the steps to take us into his hands.
A candle flame wavered once.
After that, silence settled over the table again. Only the sound of a spoon against a bowl rang out unnaturally loud.
The young ladies could not open their mouths again. Esran, too, was so busy watching the man at the far end that the food would not go down her throat.
How long that suffocating stretch of time lasted, she could not say.
Then, abruptly, the Grand Duke spoke.
"…About that river."
His voice was low and heavy. At those words, the air at the table went taut again.
"I saw it on the way in. Completely dried out."
His ash-gray eyes turned toward something beyond the window. Whatever he had seen that day, an unreadable weight sat in that gaze.
"I took a rather… careful look at the place."
The end of the sentence scattered low.
In that instant, Esran's spine locked solid with ice.
…The river.
That terrifying man had looked carefully at their river.
The young ladies beside her went white as well. Mia muttered under her breath through trembling lips, without meaning to.
"Th-the waterway—"
She couldn't finish. Mia clamped both hands over her own mouth. Beside her, Betty whispered with all the color gone from her face.
"…If he cuts off the waterway too, we're truly finished."
While Esran was painting the worst possible picture —
The Grand Duke rose sharply from his seat.
The chair scraped roughly backward, and a long screee— split the shabby hall.
In that moment, everyone at the table froze.
And he said, quietly,
"If the North were to step in."
His ash-gray eyes swept slowly down the table.
"I believe we could… bring that river back to life."
Bring it back to life.
At those words, the hall froze solid.
Esran thought her breath had stopped.
…Bring it back to life? The North… stepping in?
Their river. The single lifeline this poor country still clung to — and he was saying he would "revive" it with his own hands.
The Grand Duke slowly lifted his gaze from the soup.
Across the long table. Those ash-gray eyes landed straight on Esran.
They were the eyes of a man choosing his next words. But to Esran, they looked like the eyes of a man setting a price.
The locked gazes would not break.
Beside her, Mia held her breath and squeezed Betty's hand hard. Any word at all, and those eyes might turn this way.
Esran, unable even to look away, understood.
…He's calculating it. The price. And what he'll take in return.
In that instant, Esran's back went rigid.
What a poor country could offer. Only one thing.
The final card, sent off to the Marriage Festival.
…Surely not.
Esran slowly dropped her gaze to her own body.
Her faintly trembling fingertips, and the worn formal dress resting over them.
What that terrifying man could take as payment for reviving the river — the one thing this country still had left.
…It might be me.
Slowly, Esran raised her head again.
And met them.
Those ash-gray eyes, already turned back toward her once more.
Her heart dropped to the floor with a thud.
Those eyes said nothing. But to Esran, they looked like eyes that had already decided everything.