Chapter 11
What did that mean?
At a question I had never once imagined I would be asked, I fell silent and looked at the maid. She glanced at the prescription I had written, then spoke.
“When one serves in the imperial palace, one sees many things. Even during the season of selection, some people suffer while others torment them. It is no hardship at all to encounter suicides.”
“……”
“I have seen countless people who truly meant to die. Most were driven to it, of course, but some did end their own lives in earnest.”
I did not understand why she was saying any of this, but my body instinctively shrank back.
I shouldn’t listen.
I should cover my ears.
That thought came to me, and yet I could not escape the princess’s embrace.
She was not holding me tightly, but my arms had become tangled around my body like something slippery and invasive had latched on, and even if I tried to get up, all my strength drained away.
“Every case is different, every personality different, so every death was different as well. The place, the method, even the suicide note itself all varied. And yet all the notes they left behind shared one thing in common.”
“……Ah.”
“They showed no will to die.”
“Th, then.”
“By the time they wrote their farewell notes, they were already dead people. They only wrote down the reasons for their deaths, worrying about what would happen afterward. But to desire death with this much compulsion……”
“Please……”
“Is it not the case that, contrary to the emotions they wrote down in their notes, what they truly wished was not to die? That they believed they had to die, while longing for something else instead?”
The maid looked down at me quietly.
The emotion in her eyes had not changed at all from when she first looked at me.
If anything had changed, it was that I now knew who that emotion was directed toward.
The pity was directed at me.
But the disgust was not aimed at me.
The disgust she felt was directed at herself, and toward me she held nothing but pity and guilt.
My mind went blank.
A nameless disgust, one I could not understand why I felt at all, surged up in me and seemed to choke my throat.
My breathing grew ragged; my fingertips trembled; I felt as though ants were crawling over my entire body.
Every time the maid moved her lips, some kind of inexplicable intuition shook my head and turned the world before me hazy.
Whatever words were coming out of her mouth now would break me.
With that intuition, I looked up at her, and the maid lowered her gaze to me with pity deepening in her eyes. Then she slowly closed them.
What would come out of that mouth now?
It was not a set of words I particularly wanted to imagine, and yet the imagining would not stop.
It made me picture things in wild disorder, the same way you can’t help but imagine the feel and shape of a cockroach’s crushed body when you trap one that’s crawled out of the house under a wet wipe and mash it flat, even if you don’t want to.
Even knowing it would only make me feel worse, I couldn’t stop.
Like peeling off a scab from a wound. Like scratching at a mosquito bite. Even while I knew it would hurt me, it felt as though I had no choice but to hear it.
Physically forcing that mouth shut would have been easy.
I could simply burn whatever was in sight.
The power the curse had given me was enough for that, and if I started a fire like that, I would not have to hear a single word of it.
As for the fire itself, I could say I’d lost control of the curse.
Killing a maid would not cause the matter to spiral too far, and the Blium family would do everything they could to keep me from being executed.
“Ah……”
As those thoughts ran through me, I reached out—and my eyes fell on the necklace around the maid’s neck.
The same design as the necklace worn by the princess.
There were differences in material and the like, but it was proof of something the princess cherished, and my hand stopped where it was.
If I killed this maid now, the princess would never understand me.
She would hate the one who killed someone she cherished, and I would die without ever being able to leave that hatred behind.
Rather than taking simple revenge by killing me the way a vengeful spirit might, turning me into the thing that had made me this way, she would keep me alive however she could and torment me even after her own death.
Because that was what I thought.
It was ridiculous.
Whether it really ended up that way or not, if I truly wanted to die, I should not have stopped here.
Death was death no matter who dealt it; if I stopped now, all I would be saying was that the maid’s words had not been wrong. And yet I could no longer move.
I could have simply burned her alive, without making some pathetic excuse about becoming like one of the Blium family, but I could not bring myself to do it.
My heart would not move.
I could not summon the flames, and I could not put strength into my body.
In the end, there was something I wanted more than dying right now.
Just as the maid in front of me said, I wanted something else, and because of that I was using the princess. And writing my farewell note over and over like a madwoman had been a fit brought on by terror—that if I did die, I might not be allowed to want it.
The haze before my eyes began to clear.
A liquid ran down my cheek.
My chest trembled, and mucus spilled from my nose.
I, I, I, I, I, I, I.
……I had wanted something else.
Beyond the result of a different death, I had wanted the process that led to it.
The world in front of me turned red.
The clear tears became blood.
And when they fell to the floor, they burst into flame and began to burn.
But unlike the fire in the Forbidden Area, where the flames had raged as if they meant to consume everything, these flames trembled as though they might go out at any moment.
“……Even so, if the princess’s condition shows no improvement after three years, I will ask you, Your Highness, to let the young lady die.”
Seeing how unsightly I looked, the maid changed the subject first.
In the end, if there was still no way to cure the incurable illness, she would tell me to die.
And then she herself would kill me.
Why did that somehow feel so reassuring?
I must have been too miserable to say anything else, because the maid looked at me in silence for a moment, then closed her eyes and continued in a tone full of contempt.
“To be honest, I find it unpleasant.”
“……”
“Because death created by your selfishness will surely wound the princess deeply. Her behavior will change. Her thoughts will change. All of it, because of a single, incomprehensible desire of yours.”
“……”
“And I, we, will curse our own powerlessness. We will curse the fact that, after studying at the academy and living like human beings thanks to the princess’s help, all we can ultimately do is beg a girl who has been gaslit to please die.”
There was unmistakable hostility in the maid’s voice.
It was not so different from the feelings the servants and knights of the Blium family showed.
And yet the emotion displayed by the woman before me made me ashamed in a way theirs never had.
I felt humiliated.
Because, as she said, I had wanted something beyond death and yet was still hoping the other person would kill me.
I was ashamed.
I felt as though I had become as wretched as the head of the Blium house or the rest of his family, as though I had turned into the same sort of creature they were, and I wanted to run away.
But I could not run.
If I fled now because this was uncomfortable, then I really would become exactly the same as the people of Blium.
Thinking that, I gathered my strength and looked at the maid.
“Clara, that is enough. What do you think you are doing to a child of only ten years old?”
“……Your Highness. Have you coughed?”
“Mm. The pillow I was hugging was rather hard, so it was not easy to sleep. I cannot ask for more medicine either, so it is troublesome, to say the least.”
The princess sat up.
Her eyes, opening slowly, still carried the lingering ache and fatigue in them, yet her voice was so clear that none of it seemed to show. She moved the maid back with a single phrase, then pushed herself upright.
After that, she clicked her tongue at the blood on her arm and told her to prepare a bath. The maid lowered her head at the princess’s command, then walked backward out of the room.
And once the room was left to the two of us, the princess looked down at me in silence before slowly speaking.
“Do you not think that is rather too harsh for a child?”
“……Ah, th-that.”
“I would appreciate it if you could understand. I helped her from start to finish so she could achieve her dream, and it seems she became a little too single-minded because of it.”
The princess stared vaguely at the door as if reminiscing about the past, then slowly closed and opened her eyes, as though shaking herself free of memory. She parted her lips again.
“This is not something I can speak of lightly, as I am but an outsider, but…… I hope you will not hate her too much for speaking so sharply to you. She does it because she sees a reflection of herself in you.”
“I, I……”
“……”
“So……”
“Come to think of it, this too is no kindness to you, is it.”
The princess gently stroked my cheek and wiped away the moisture at the corner of my eyes.
When I closed my eyes at her touch, she pulled me into a light embrace and begged me to forgive her subordinate’s rudeness. At her request, I forced my unmoving head to shake from side to side.
Then the princess bit her lip as if holding something back and said she would prepare my clothes, and that we should go for a walk together later.