The Princess Could Not Forget
The Grand Duchess could not forget.
After entrusting the sleeping Rebecca to the Duke and Duchess, I made my way back into the banquet hall.
The reason was twofold: the banquet was far from over, and I wanted to see with my own eyes the event from the original novel that took place on the second day of the Imperial Banquet.
It certainly wasn't because I longed to watch an event I'd only ever read on a page come to life before me.
What use would I possibly have for spectating the Crown Prince Mikhail's romance event, when I'm the protagonist of my own life? Besides, I already knew exactly what was going to happen—I'd read it all. There was hardly any need to review material I had memorized.
No, there was only one thing I wanted to confirm.
"...Just how much has the original story changed?"
How wide was the gap between the plot of The Crown Prince Wields a Sword as I remembered it, and the reality unfolding right in front of me?
Even now, the current had already bent considerably. Rebecca and the Crown Prince, who by all rights should have been meeting each other for the first time today, somehow already knew one another. And the 'Attempted Assassination of the Saintess'—one of the story's pivotal events—had been turned completely on its head, because the assassins had come for Rebecca and me instead of the Saintess.
Had things followed the original, the Church, upon learning of that incident, would have demanded reparations from the Imperial Family. Estelle, as the Saintess, would have pushed back against it—and that clash would have become the catalyst that drew Mikhail and Estelle irrevocably together. That catalyst had now all but vanished into thin air.
Then there was Isabella Bluebell. It was baffling that a girl who should have eyes only for the Crown Prince had taken an interest in me. Her character was established as having been groomed since childhood for the position of Empress—she was supposed to brush off every young noble courting her and gaze at Mikhail alone. Yes, I'd put on a waltz performance the day before that drew every eye in the hall, but I couldn't for the life of me predict why that would turn her attention away from the Crown Prince and onto me.
And so, for all these reasons, I had returned to the banquet hall to verify whether the events that were supposed to happen would actually happen—
"...So. How is the Grand Duchess faring?"
"She is sleeping quite soundly, Your Highness."
—and now I was sitting beside Mikhail, who slumped in his seat looking thoroughly worn out, keeping him company.
"Leaving a drunken fiancée all on her own. You truly are a wretched sort of man."
"...Are you aware, Your Highness, that one of the reasons my fiancée got drunk in the first place was you?"
"Haha. You do have a knack for jokes."
...
A thought that kept nagging at me: this Mikhail felt remarkably distant from the Mikhail of the original novel I knew.
The Crown Prince of the novel was supposed to be steadfast and a man of few words—a personality that had swept every noblewoman of his generation clean off her feet.
"And yet you, who know full well whose fault it is that I—a man who hasn't even held his coming-of-age ceremony—have been drinking tonight, still have the gall to say that."
...
The man sitting next to me now was more like an emperor worn ragged by decades of wrangling with the aristocracy, someone who had simply resigned himself to everything. Exactly as Rebecca had once put it: a man whose depths you could not fathom at all.
"...Do you not intend to enjoy the banquet further, Your Highness?"
A few accidental glasses of wine or not, the Crown Prince was hardly in the state Rebecca was—dead to the world. So why was he sitting there doing nothing, quietly absorbing the pointed stares being drilled into his back?
The question had occurred to me on a whim, so I asked him.
"And why is it that the young master saying this isn't enjoying the banquet himself? Is something about it not to your liking?"
Far from answering, Mikhail threw the question right back at me.
...
I was briefly at a loss for words. I could hardly tell the Crown Prince—the de facto host of this entire banquet—that something about it displeased me. And I certainly couldn't tell an outsider like Mikhail about the promise Rebecca and I had made between the two of us.
"You seem to have your circumstances as well. Everyone has their circumstances, do they not? There's no need for us to be curious about each other's behavior."
"...Understood."
It was clear he simply wanted the topic dropped, so I could do nothing but nod along.
And then, a short while later—
"Your Highness. Someone has asked me to deliver this note to you..."
"Hand it here."
A man who appeared to be an imperial attendant passed a folded note to Mikhail.
"...My apologies. Something has come up that requires me to step away."
To Mikhail, who sought my leave after reading it, I could say with an easy conscience:
"I'm perfectly fine. Go on, hurry."
Thankfully, the original plot was still alive and well.
*
The note.
The starting point of the second event to unfold in The Crown Prince Wields a Sword.
The first event, of course, had been the 'Attempted Assassination of the Saintess'—and the second, about to begin, was just as tightly bound to Estelle.
To summarize the event briefly: after the assassin attack, Estelle, her heart stirred with gratitude toward the Crown Prince, finished all her duties the following day and then secretly sent him a note. Since she hadn't signed her name, a curious Mikhail found himself drawn back to the palace garden, just as he'd been the day before. There he met Estelle, the two of them talked, and their relationship grew closer. That was the gist of it.
It was one of the stock clichés of romance fantasy—right up there with the assassination attempt. Plausibility? Practically nonexistent.
For one thing, the Crown Prince—a man who should value his own life above anyone else's—was waltzing off to a garden based solely on the contents of a note from an unknown sender. For another, the Saintess, who had very nearly been beaten half to death by assassins the day before, had apparently lost all survival instinct and was waiting for the Crown Prince in that same garden again. Any reader would finish that scene muttering, what on earth is this...
But still.
'...Well, I suppose it could happen.'
By now I'd made my peace with it. I'd said it before and I'll say it again: The Crown Prince Wields a Sword did not suffer from merely one or two plot holes. What could anyone expect from an author who had gone and ruined the single greatest noble house in the story—the Valencia Ducal Family—purely because he didn't want readers dunking on him in the comments? A lack of plausibility at this level was almost cute.
So, having confirmed that the original plot still breathed, all that remained was to send the Crown Prince on his way and go back to nibbling at the banquet's food, just as I had been.
I wasn't sure whether my fiancée, currently off traveling in dreamland, would return to reality before the banquet ended. But if she did wake up and come back out to the hall, I thought it might be nice to share one more dance, like last night.
Perhaps the only reason she'd drunk herself into that state was because I knew what was in her heart and pretended not to. If I spent what little time remained of the banquet at her side, maybe the sulkiness in my fiancée's heart would thaw a little.
...That was what I had thought, once upon a time.
"We meet again, Lord Albert Zernias."
...
—Right up until the woman I had already turned down once, wearing a face of utter shamelessness, came sidling up to me again.
Rebecca currently wanted nothing more than to find a mouse hole and crawl straight into it.
As always, the reason was her fiancé.
No—this time, it wasn't only her fiancé.
"There's no way you didn't know how I felt."
"You always read other people's hearts like a damn ghost, and now you pretend you didn't know?"
The words her drunk past self had spoken kept surfacing in her mind, over and over, torturing her without mercy.
"...Uuugh."
"Rebecca? You're awake?"
Even the worried voice of her mother, the Duchess of Valencia, at her side barely registered. She was too busy drowning in self-recrimination over what on earth she could have been thinking when she'd said those things.
"...It was because I was anxious."
"Because I was afraid... that you might dance with someone... someone other than me..."
THWACK—
"...Rebecca?"
She drove her fist down into the pillow she'd been resting on moments before.
Squeak—
The pillow, absorbing the full force of her considerable strength, let out a pitiful sound as it crumpled—but that was beside the point. The point was: what on earth had possessed her past self to say such a thing?
Anxious? She, the only daughter of the Ducal House of Valencia, felt anxious—over nothing more than the possibility that her fiancé might dance with another woman?
Such... such shameless words... what could she possibly have been thinking when she said them...
"I've always thought the Grand Duchess was beautiful, you know. A shame, really."
FWOOSH—
Albert's words, resurfacing at precisely the worst possible moment, painted her cheeks a deep, burning red. Her head was spinning in circles. He'd thought she was beautiful all this time?
Him—the man who did nothing but tease her day after day, who knew exactly how she felt and played dumb about it. Him—a fiancé with not a single redeeming quality, a man whose manners you could search for with your eyes peeled wide and never find—
"How is it... that this... somehow looks so dashing today?"
...
CRACK—
A surprisingly crisp sound rang out.
"Rebecca!"
She heard her mother cry out beside her, startled half to death. Naturally. From her mother's perspective, she must have looked like a madwoman who had woken from a drunken sleep and immediately begun slapping her own cheeks.
But—
"I... said... that?"
Unfortunately, her mother's voice did not reach a woman whose every fiber was consumed by resentment toward a certain substance called alcohol. She felt ready, right that instant, to march off and lodge a formal petition with the Crown Prince she liked least anyway.
That the beverage known as alcohol must be outlawed by imperial statute.
That it was a drink that turned perfectly sane human beings into lunatics.
The petition absolutely had to be filed.
And she had to speak to Albert. She had to tell him that she had, briefly, gone mad from the drink. That there was no conceivable way she would ever have said something so disgraceful.
She absolutely had to tell him.
Because otherwise, her fiancé would get the mistaken impression that she liked him. He would mistake something that could never, ever happen for the truth.
Her—liking her fiancé? It was utterly impossible. Utterly impossible, and utterly unforgivable if it were true.
Even Rebecca, thinking these thoughts, couldn't have explained why. But at the very least, that was what Rebecca at the time believed.
"...And where is that man?"
"You mean Lord Albert?"
And so she asked her mother point-blank for Albert's whereabouts. She had to correct the misunderstanding her fiancé was surely harboring, no matter what it took.
"He was here until your father and I came in... I imagine he's gone back to the banquet hall by now."
...
It wasn't a perfect answer, but it was more than enough. She might not know exactly where she'd been laid down, but she was hardly such a fool that she couldn't find a place she'd already been once.
BANG—
"The very first thing she does upon waking is go looking for her fiancé..."
"...Why, that's love, dear."
Ignoring the absurd muttering at her back, Rebecca set off for the banquet hall once more.
When she at last arrived and beheld the scene unfolding inside—
"...Ha."
A cold laugh escaped her lips.
Her fiancé—the man who claimed they'd barely spoken a word between them—and Isabella Bluebell, together.
The instant she laid eyes on them, an emotion she could not name seized dominion over her heart. It drove her to stride toward the two conversing figures, step by deliberate step, and it drove her to seize her fiancé's hand without a moment's hesitation and declare:
"...What do you think you're doing? A man who is supposed to be my fiancé, and no one else's."
...
"Alone. With another woman."
Any thought of gently correcting the misunderstanding Albert might be harboring had long since evaporated into nothing.