Chapter 14
“Even if something else has come to matter to you after meeting me, I do not think you are a villain. It has been a month. A month. In that time, if you’d wanted to kill people, you could have killed plenty, and if you’d merely meant to hurt them, you could have injured any number of them as well. But aside from the time you escaped the Forbidden Area, you have not harmed a single soul.”
“…….”
“Curious how I found out?”
“Yes.”
“When I heard that offering the life of one of the princes could save me, I began asking questions about the princess. The moment I heard that lives were being traded for one another, marriage came to mind. It was not terribly difficult. The people around you had remarkably loose lips, so they could be bought for very little money.”
“Ah.”
“Truth be told, I did not even need to offer payment. They all hated you—maids and servants alike. One question, and they practically spilled everything as if a dam had burst.”
At the princess’s words, I remembered the maids who had been assigned to care for me.
Unlike the maids and attendants, they were from noble families.
They had pledged loyalty to the Blium family, and whenever I tore my clothes to shreds, or simply stared at my food without eating it, or smashed furniture and screamed at them not to touch anything, they looked at me with eyes full of contempt.
No, even now, they probably still did.
To them, I was nothing but a filthy enemy trying to kill the princes.
And while the princes were trash to me, they were apparently quite popular with the people who worked in this mansion, so the princess was right—it would not be impossible for them to have deliberately spoken badly of me.
……Still, I could not stop myself from being angry.
If anything, I was the victim here.
I had borne the curse in their place for ten years. If they had intended to kill me as promised, then that would have been one thing, but the ones who had tried to keep me alive like livestock instead were the people of the Blium ducal house, not me.
Reincarnation itself was something even the people of Blium could not do anything about, so I could let that go, but for the same people who had been the perpetrators for ten years to suddenly start acting like victims and condemning me now—it was impossible not to find that infuriating.
“The princess cursed by a seal, the one everyone says is wicked. But did that princess ever actually harm anyone else? When I asked it that way, it was difficult to answer yes. There were things like shredding clothes and wasting money, or throwing away the chef’s food and making him come under suspicion. But there was no testimony that you had ever injured anyone. And one of the knights even said that when he subdued you in the Forbidden Area, you charged at him as though you were trying to die on purpose.”
“He must have seen it wrong.”
“Ha. If he had truly seen it wrong, you would not have corrected me so quickly.”
“…….”
“The fact that you rebutted me immediately means it was probably true. And if I think about it like that, calling you a villain makes no sense at all. Not unless you think the same sort of idiot who gives money to women and turns them into seal-bearers is somehow any better.”
Laughing brightly with an almost musical ah-ha-ha, the princess turned her cold, freezing stare on the head of the Blium family and cursed him out, completely at odds with the cheerfulness of her voice.
“Since it is an internal matter of the house, I suppose it is difficult to say too much, but that was hardly noble behavior. To study and interpret the curse properly, then handle it, instead of producing an illegitimate child and causing all this trouble—surely they had decades to work with.”
“Hah. Since every previous head of the family failed, they must have been afraid.”
“Even so, creating a child just to kill one person was something they should never have done. No—afraid or not, they should never have hidden it. But what is reality? Afraid of being criticized by others, they did not even give you a name, did not register you in the family ledger, and merely kept you alive. It is an act deserving of contempt.”
“If Your Highness had been in their place, would you have done the same?”
“Of course.”
Lies. People can say anything with their mouth.
I thought that as I looked at her answer, given without the slightest hesitation, but the princess met my eyes with those icy blue irises of hers.
Ridiculously, that one look was more persuasive than a thousand words.
When I looked into those eyes, I found myself thinking of excuses on the princess’s behalf.
She was someone who would endure three years of pain for the sake of her own happiness even though she had a way to survive right now, or someone who understood the weight of life far better than I did and yet could still meet her own death with such composure—
“If I accepted the princess’s proposal, and if I gave birth to and raised the next generation of Blium, and if I loved those children more than anything else, then I would shift the curse onto myself. If the alternative is killing someone else, then that is the right thing to do.”
“This curse won’t even accept anyone who doesn’t have Blium blood.”
“Then I would research a way to transfer it. There are only four ducal houses in the empire. Do you know how much power that means? An ordinary minor kingdom would not even dare lift its head.”
“…….”
“With that kind of power, you could obtain information others would never even know existed. You would use that knowledge to try to erase the curse. And if erasing it proved impossible, you would transfer it onto yourself and bear it. Is that not the price of failure? To make a person just to avoid paying that price—it is revolting.”
Perhaps because she had been pouring anger into her words for so long, her eyes had grown a little cloudy.
Seeing that, a dull ache suddenly throbbed in my chest, and I tugged at the princess’s hand. When I reached out first, her eyes widened into perfect circles, and then she gave an embarrassed little laugh and patted my head.
“In any case, yes, three hours. Will that be possible?”
“……Yes. It can’t be helped.”
“Then let us meet around two in the afternoon. I shall have a snack prepared, so make sure you eat lunch before you come.”
“Isn’t it usually the other way around?”
“You are in such a state that you can barely put on weight even if you eat both a proper meal and a snack, so you are an exception.”
The princess joked that I ought to put on some flesh so she could call me over for naps more easily, then slightly furrowed her brows. I looked at her through the knowledge left behind by the curse, then wrapped my arms around her body and helped support her as I returned her to her room.
After that, I went back to my own room and sat there dazed, turning over my conversation with the princess again and again.
As much as my memory would allow, and as carefully as I could.
Every breath, every tone.
I kept recalling and mulling over all of it, and each time I did, something I could not identify stirred in my chest.
An emotion I thought I had long since forgotten.
But whatever it was, it was too calm in my chest to be jealousy, or anything so simple.
The feeling I had once had toward my younger sister in my previous life had been like darkness in the middle of the night creeping out of the bed, a monster that spread over my body until the blanket and I were no longer distinguishable. But this feeling, no matter how many times I turned it over, did not let the blanket’s shadow swallow me; instead, it made my body feel sharper, more vivid.
The pain was gone entirely from my arm—an arm I had only ever registered as something that happened to be hanging there—and yet now I could feel exactly what shape it had. I could feel my chest rise and fall with every breath.
……
Once my body became so sensitive, I suddenly began to see it.
A body with all the muscle and flesh stripped away, leaving only bone, veins, and the skin stretched over them.
It was a body I had never once cared about, but once I became aware of it, it started to bother me like a hangnail under the nail, and at the same time I became aware of hunger.
A sensation I had not been able to feel even while starving for a month.
The feeling that my insides were being dragged upward, my jaw muscles loosening until I opened my mouth like a dog, forcing my parched salivary glands to squeeze out whatever they could and somehow make spit—like falling down into an animal.
At that sense of descent, I clamped my mouth shut and tried to endure the hunger as I had a few weeks earlier, but the sensation of my gaunt body, the princess’s remark that it was uncomfortable to sleep while holding me, her saying she preferred it when I had put on some flesh—all of it came back to me, and an unbearable sensation began to wash over my body.
The inside of my esophagus turned rough and scratchy.
There was no moisture there at all, and yet the moment I spoke too much, the flesh inside seemed to swell, making even the slightest movement of my tongue ache.
My squeezed salivary glands complained of overwork, paralyzing the muscles around them, and every breath that passed through only sharpened my nerves further, driving them to their limit.
Even so, as if refusing to give up on eating despite all that abuse, my mouth began to fill with saliva, and my nose started searching out the smell of food.
Beginning with the human instinct for finding abnormal moisture, every scent was obsessively sorted through as though anything edible would do, and my eyes burned with the urge to swallow even leather shoes if that was all that was left.
I could not lose to desire.
Thinking that, I turned my body away, but once hunger had taken hold of me, it only made my senses sharper and sharper until I had no choice but to force myself upright against the pain.
……Let’s eat.
Let’s eat anything.
Muttering that to myself, I opened the door and stepped out, and the maid waiting there started at my appearance before asking why I was coming out.
“I’m going to eat.”
“……We were not prepared for that, since the princess did not eat. I apologize.”
“…….”
“I will guide you to the dining hall.”
“No, forget the dining hall.”
“Pardon?”
“The chef probably doesn’t want to cook for me anyway. How am I supposed to know he won’t just serve me garbage disguised as fine cuisine?”
At my words, the maid looked at me as if I were ridiculous.
Well, she was not wrong—there was some irony in a worm gnawing away at the family making such a statement.
But even so, I did not want to eat garbage if it was only going to interfere with putting on weight.
More than anything, I did not want to beg someone who did not want to cook for me in the first place.
If they were going to feed me poison, I would gladly eat it, but since that was not the case, I had no choice but to go look for food myself.
With that thought, I turned my steps toward the kitchen.
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