Chapter 8
The Fourth Princess carried me all the way to her room without ever setting me down.
“First things first,” she said as she placed me at the table. “I don’t have any objection to taking a person’s life.”
It was less an acceptance than a refusal in all but name.
I frowned at the preamble, and the princess continued, slicing the bread into small pieces as she spoke.
“A princess’s station is such that, even if she does nothing at all, her very existence costs many lives. I have no intention of denying that. And for that reason, I have no plans to dismiss your proposal as nonsense, either.”
“Then why won’t you kill me?”
“Because I don’t want to take responsibility.”
“……”
“I lived diligently for the sake of those who sacrificed themselves for me. I don’t think I’ve paid that debt in full, but I’ve done everything I could as a princess. I attended every event held by the imperial family, and I never stopped supporting artists, either.”
The princess spoke of everything else she had done with an almost detached calm.
And that calm was strange.
Normally, people said such things to erase guilt. To make it sound as though, because they had done this much and that much, your sacrifice was only natural.
But what the princess was saying about her own life was different.
It was simply a recitation of facts.
There was no attempt to make me feel anything about what she had done, no effort to steer me toward forgiveness or gratitude. Just the plain arrangement of one fact after another.
If she were making excuses, she would have tried to nudge me into agreement. If I told her she couldn’t sustain her own life by taking someone else’s, she would have provoked me by asking what made that different from everything she had already done.
But because she only laid out the facts, I found myself unable to say anything back.
I wanted to persuade her rationally and logically, if I could.
Only, I couldn’t.
I didn’t have the ability.
Because I had been made for a purpose, shaped to suit that need, but in the end I had always been used as something emotional.
If I had been judged by reason from the beginning, I might never have been born at all.
I was a being despised and loathed even more because of the guilt of the one who had made me.
“Eat.”
“I—”
“When I have a serious conversation with someone, I always eat something. It’s partly a matter of hospitality, and partly because talking while sharing the same food makes people more honest about what’s on their minds.”
“……”
“If you want something from me, then you will grant me one request as well.”
If I didn’t eat, then there would be no conversation.
The princess said it in a firm voice, and I bit my lip at her words before reluctantly taking the bread.
It was painfully difficult to eat anything after nearly a month.
Even though the bread was clearly moist, my mouth felt gritty, as if I were chewing sand, and when I forced my saliva into making room to swallow, I could feel exactly where the food was passing through my throat from the stinging pain it left behind.
So I frowned, and the princess told me to drink some water too. I scowled at her order, then obeyed and drank.
“Good.”
Her voice was faintly playful, utterly unlike the atmosphere wrapped around us.
At that, I found myself snapping back before I could stop myself.
“Then may I ask why you won’t kill me? Or are you perhaps afraid of death?”
“Of course I am. I’m afraid of it. I’ve lived with every manner of illness since the day I was born, and I’ve spent more of my life close to death than to life, but I’m still afraid of dying. I’m afraid of death, and I’m afraid of what comes after it.”
“Then—”
“But there is something more frightening than that.”
“……?”
“I’m afraid of losing myself.”
Then the princess gave me her truth.
She stripped away even the smallest mask a person might wear and showed me herself bare.
“I’m afraid of betraying everyone who risked their lives to find medicine and treat me, all so they could keep me alive. I’m afraid of not being loved by them.”
She laid bare everything she had gained in her struggle against disease and death.
Her scars, her fear, her strength, her beauty.
She exposed all of it to me, without the slightest pretense or lie.
“I’m afraid that, as a member of the Portia imperial family, I’ll burn through the precarious life I’ve been given and become unable to look upon all the imperial subjects I once protected with the same eyes. I’m afraid of denying everything I’ve done and becoming nothing more than a princess who lives for the sake of her bloodline.”
And those words shut my mouth.
She had lived a life unlike mine, and so even the things she said were built on a foundation completely different from mine. And yet, for reasons I couldn’t quite explain, they were terribly, terribly similar to the things I feared.
Come to think of it, wasn’t I the same? Hadn’t I also fought desperately to die because I hated simply being alive?
I had wanted to be born human and live as a human, but I couldn’t. I had fought to die because I was afraid of being reduced to something like a doll, hadn’t I?
I had struggled like this because I wanted to die not as livestock, but as a person—no, at the very least, as a human being. So I couldn’t deny the princess’s words.
To deny her words would be to deny everything I had ever wanted, as well.
My lips moved faintly.
Something that could not quite become language circled in my mouth, and my body trembled for a reason that had nothing to do with weakness or exhaustion.
I trembled at the intuition that I wouldn’t be able to say anything here.
Perhaps sensing that, the princess picked up a piece of bread and placed it in my mouth as she went on.
“So then, I propose a deal, my lady.”
“……”
“If what the family head said is true, I can live for another three years. In that time, make me able to take responsibility for you. If I can say that I’m capable of doing so, then I’ll take your life. And in the meantime, I will do my best to understand you. Well, I don’t want to die either, you see.”
The Fourth Princess smiled as she stroked my cheek.
My eyes fluttered at her touch, and I slumped back into the chair. Still smiling, the princess lifted me into her arms again.
“And I have no intention of taking the life of a beast, so come properly dressed next time. I’ll have the maid deliver clothing to you.”
The princess met my gaze head-on and made me a promise.
If I came to believe she could bear the responsibility, then she would take my throat into her own hands and live by sacrificing one of the sons of Blium.
She would live on like that, and continue living as the illustrious princess of the empire.
Again, she spoke calmly and without concealment or ornament, and I stared blankly at her face before being laid down inside the room.
Inside the room with the pillars and the leash.
And as I touched that leash, a flood of emotions began to rise within me—emotions I had not felt in front of the princess.
Helplessness, confusion, anxiety.
If I was to become someone the princess could take responsibility for, didn’t that mean I had to become someone capable of giving her affection? But how was I supposed to do that?
What was I supposed to do with something I had never received, something I couldn’t even imitate?
No, this was not the time to think about methods.
If I wasn’t accepted by the princess this time, then it felt as though no one would ever accept my life at all.
It was only an intuition, but it felt true.
Other people wouldn’t kindly explain themselves the way the princess had, and they certainly wouldn’t take my life on such favorable terms.
If I failed this time, no one would take my life.
At that thought, I bit my own finger without meaning to, and the bitter taste of blood mingled with pus spread across my mouth, along with a sweetness that didn’t resemble blood at all.
“Hey!”
That was when it happened.
A man’s voice, still awkward and cracking at the edge of adolescence, rang out, and at the same moment, something struck my face hard.
“What the hell! Who told you to say something like that?!”
Knocked over by the force against my head, I found myself pinned beneath a man who spat rough breaths and swung his fists in pure instinct.
Of course, it didn’t hurt.
Unless a knight struck with mana, this body didn’t even register the slightest impact, so a middle-schooler throwing half-formed punches with nothing but instinct wasn’t even fit to be called an attack.
“Are you trying to kill me and my brother or what?!”
So the one hitting me was the second son.
Had he decided that the youngest one would be cursed first?
Fear clung to the prince’s voice, and he was shouting to hide it.
He raised his voice and spat out rough words.
With the hand that had slapped my face, he grabbed one of the things lying around the room and used it to beat me.
He snapped the leash on me and yanked it this way and that, trying to press me down as harshly as possible.
But all of those efforts to look vicious were absurdly ridiculous.
“Pfft.”
“Y-you’re laughing?”
“Hahahahaha!”
Yes. Most people were like this.
The moment they thought they might die, they would throw caution to the wind, rage like wildfire just to keep themselves alive, and the instant they realized they might survive, all that anger would die down without leaving even a trace of ash behind.
Why had I been so uneasy about it?
Wasn’t that simply what human beings were?
Wasn’t someone from the Blium family supposed to act less noble than the Fourth Princess and more like a beast?
If I had to die so that another person could live, then of course they would do it.
Ah. So that was it. I’d been enchanted, hadn’t I?
I’d been bewitched by the Fourth Princess’s nobility.
I’d gone blind to the princess’s wish, so similar to mine and yet so fundamentally different.
I want to die.
I want to die by the Fourth Princess’s hand.
I want to be caught in the current of the Fourth Princess’s dream and burn to death like a moth.
Thinking that, I grinned, and the young prince of Blium looked down at my face for a moment before screaming and fleeing the room.