Ventorino Kingdom - Seed of Discord (9)
"Unlock."
With a soft slide and a click, the window came open. Valdes slipped inside, murmuring to himself, "Huh. It's still a royal castle, after all. The defenses are better than I expected."
Still, without the chief court mage around, it wasn't difficult.
He muttered the words under his breath and stepped through the window into the room.
The chamber was dark and quiet. Normally he would have waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, but that was meaningless to a man who had honed himself to the extreme. Seeing his target plainly, he moved toward her with silent steps.
A woman was sleeping soundly on the bed.
Princess Clara seemed to be a little restless in her sleep, because she had dragged the edge of the blanket upward and exposed everything below her knees. Her legs were white and smooth, but they didn't stir much lust in him.
He had already worked himself hard on Mercede and Mari during the day, after all. More importantly, he wasn't here to take her; he had come to carve a Mark. It was time to stay true to his purpose.
"Let's see...."
He pulled the blanket higher, all the way up from her knees. Along with it, the nightdress she wore was rolled upward too, and soon Clara's pink undergarments were revealed.
He did not even spare that direction a glance. Instead, he laid a finger against the princess's lower abdomen.
Just as he was about to engrave the Mark, he paused for a moment and cast a brief sleep spell over her first. He did it to keep Clara from waking at the faint excitement that would come with the engraving. He didn't know how sensitive the princess might be, so a little caution seemed necessary.
With the sleeping beauty pressed even deeper into slumber by the spell, he finally used the Mark magic.
Vvvvvmm—
"...ngh. ...Hh, ...haa... ngh."
Soft moans leaked from the lips of the princess, who lay buried in sleep. Her body shifted on the bed now and then, and a faint heat seemed to bloom across her skin.
To anyone else watching, she would have looked ill. In truth, though, she was getting aroused in her sleep. If he hadn't put her under so deeply with the sleep spell, she might even have reached absentmindedly for her underwear.
She's going to have a wet dream tonight... hmm? A wet dream? ...Interesting.
As he watched Clara, Valdes silently turned over the word that had just come to mind.
Succubi were demons of lust, yes, but they were also demons of dreams. He had heard that, inside dreams, a virgin could be spared while all manner of play was still possible, which was why quite a few succubi preferred that route.
"This might work. I can't exactly enter her dream directly or use her however I want, but steering her toward the kind of situation I want should be...."
While carving the Mark with one hand, Valdes began constructing a magic formula with the other.
The system was enchantment magic.
Unfortunately, unlike with other matters, he hadn't been able to analyze the dream arts that succubi used. That made high-level manipulation impossible. Still, if he mixed enchantment and spiritual magic together in the right balance, light dream manipulation should be within reach.
Especially with someone like Princess Clara, a normal human, and with his Mark already carved into her. Interfering from the inside would be easy enough.
"Good. That's done."
It hadn't even been a few minutes since he carved the Mark into her lower abdomen when the spell formula was completed as well. It was a hurried, improvised piece of magic, but it should be enough to show her the same dream for several days. Casting it directly on Clara would have been more efficient, but that carried a greater risk of other mages detecting it.
For example, the royal chief mage, who would be returning tomorrow. He was an old man steeped in magic, and especially sensitive to this sort of thing.
So Valdes used the pillow she was sleeping on as the base. If she lay down on it, she would dream the lewd dream he had designated for her. No matter how diligently she tried to stay clean, she wouldn't be changing her pillow anytime soon. People in high positions were always particular about their beds; they rarely replaced the things resting on them.
For once, Valdes even recited the incantation as he worked the spell. Then he rose from the bed and left the princess's room. On his way out, he didn't forget to lock the window the way it had been before.
"Well, then, I should go back to sle— no."
He was just about to return to his own chamber and turn in when he shook his head.
It'd be a waste to go back now.
Both the captain of the knight order and the chief court mage were out of the palace at the same time. A night like this probably wouldn't come again for as long as he stayed in the Ventorino Kingdom. In other words, sneaking around at night like this was likely a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It felt wrong to just go back.
"A place worth visiting... there really is only one."
He didn't spend long thinking about it.
Valdes headed straight for Queen Katarina's chambers.
He had already taken care of Mercede and Mari during the day, and there was no need to sneak up on Ethylene or the other attendants. He could walk right into their rooms without much concern.
And since there was no reason to bother with Marc or Alfonso, only one choice remained.
The path to Katarina's chambers wasn't difficult. He had already been summoned there several times by the owner of the room, and through those visits he had mapped out the entire area. Security spells, places to hide his body, and so on. Since this was a secret meeting, he had also learned the approximate patrol routes and times, even the hidden passageways.
That made him wonder if it was actually a trap. Or perhaps the security was simply too lax. He decided it was Katarina's arrogance — the confidence of a woman who had already determined the weaknesses of her unfaithful partners so they could never exploit them. Of course, given that nothing had happened so far, her plan did seem to be working.
She's sleeping soundly too. I suppose that's only natural at this hour.
Valdes slipped successfully into the chambers.
With unhurried steps, he moved to the bed beside the sleeping queen and settled in close.
A beautiful woman slept deeply there, her wavy white hair gathered into one long braid and laid neatly beside her head. Like most people, if you looked only at her sleeping face, you would never imagine she was the haughty, overbearing queen.
"...Come to think of it, Valdes has never seen her like this at all."
That was because from the very first meeting, he had been making full use of enchantment magic.
It would have been amusing to conquer a woman who looked down on him and treated him as nothing, then pin her beneath him, but there was a little regret in that. Still, Katarina's personality was far from admirable, and the thought of her collapsing and moaning under his cock made him imagine the shock it would give Marc, which lifted his mood again.
As he pictured that soon-to-be-realized scene, Valdes carefully slipped a hand into the blanket and began massaging the queen's breasts.
Her ample, soft chest lost its neat, round shape beneath his fingers. When he pressed with more force, the flesh bulged between his knuckles, then sank back in again.
Compared to the two women who bore the title of queen that he knew, hers was certainly lacking, but it was still the well-maintained, dignified chest of a queen.
When he gathered the flesh with his fingers and held it gently, Katarina suddenly gave a small shiver and let out a heated breath.
"Haa... ngh...."
It was a reaction very different from Clara's — the reaction of a married woman who knew the taste of a man.
The excitement and pleasure that came with the Mark being carved into her body were no less than touching a sensitive spot. Unlike the princess, who had shown only faint reactions even while deeply asleep under magic, Katarina was far more responsive.
It was downright obscene how quickly her nipples rose hard beneath the fabric.
Come to think of it, I haven't touched this pair yet.
Mischief and lust flared together in Valdes's eyes. He climbed over her so he could reach her more easily, tugged the nightdress downward, and then gathered the exposed breasts in both hands so that her nipples pushed up between his fingers.
"Hnngh...! Hhaa... aaah, someth—"
The queen woke at that very moment.
Feeling the figure above her gripping her breasts, Katarina blinked in confusion. She had only just woken, her mind still half lost in sleep, and the darkness of the room made it impossible to tell who it was.
The boy quickly took one of her nipples into his mouth.
"Hnn! H, haa...."
A heated sigh spilled from Katarina's lips, and one name slipped out with it.
"Ngh... Al, sneaking in again...?"
"...?"
"Haa, you'll be engaged soon enough, so you really should wean yourself off your mother's breasts...."
Saying that, she lifted both arms and wrapped them around his head.
What the hell?
The sudden name of her son left him the one who was stunned.
Still, it wasn't hard to understand what was happening. The thought made laughter rise in his chest. From the way she was speaking, it sounded like Alfonso had been coming to her room recently as well. More than that, he seemed to have been doing exactly what Valdes was doing now — stripping his mother out of her nightdress, fondling her breasts, and sucking at her nipples.
A fourteen-year-old prince still drinking from his mother's breasts? What a ridiculous mama's boy. Valdes was almost dumbfounded. People were full of surprises, but he hadn't thought that kid would grow up to be a proper king.
Well, at this point, maybe that doesn't matter anymore.
He was planning to take the country he would one day inherit, along with the mother and sister belonging to it, so he sucked hard on Katarina's nipple.
"...Hiiht! Ah, haa... ngh? Nghh... ah, Al...?"
Under the sudden suction, Katarina changed in an instant from a gentle mother into a woman full of lust. Even while she gasped in embarrassment, she still called out her son's name. She could feel the sleep being blown away by the exquisite tongue play tormenting her nipples.
"Ah, aaah...?"
"Mmmph, chuup, slurp, lick...."
"Hah, hngh...! W-wait...♡"
But she was still no more fully awake than before. Katarina struggled to understand what was happening, yet Valdes's caresses were blatant and relentless.
"W-who, ngh... hey...! Ngh, how dare you come into the queen's chamber... haaang...♡"
Even as she failed to keep her head straight under the dizzying pleasure in her breasts, she still tried to identify the man sucking at her milk. For a moment, she even wondered if he was some complete stranger, but she didn't believe anyone like that could have broken in here.
He was a little bigger than Alfonso, at least in the dark. And someone who could sneak in here and do something like this. Ridiculously, one person immediately came to mind. As she slowly adjusted to the darkness, his face also came into focus.
"V-Val... haa, des... You, you are....?"
"Smack, suck, kiss.... Heh, that's right."
Valdes lifted his head and smiled playfully. Seeing that, Katarina's brow furrowed hard.
"W-what are you doing right now!"
"What else? I'm drinking our queen's milk. In place of the king and the prince."
"!!"
Katarina had started to flare up at that answer, thinking this wasn't the thing to be asking about, but the words that followed immediately afterward turned her face bright red. Even a normal person could have clearly seen the crimson in her cheeks in the pitch-black room. Newly exposed humiliation made the queen grit her teeth.
"You... this absolutely has to stay a secret."
"That depends on how you handle it, doesn't it, Queen?"
"......"
Compared to the queen's affair with the king, Alfonso was a weakness that was downright serious.
One of the heroes who had saved the continent. The founder who had declared vengeance against the old dynasty and opened the door to the new one. Compared to Marc, Alfonso was nothing. If he wasn't the first king of the new dynasty, the rest of it hardly mattered, and the name of the hero's son wasn't nearly as compelling as the heir of a ducal house.
It wasn't as if she was trying to marry Alfonso to Mari for no reason.
Strong royal authority.
Not only did she want her son to inherit the throne safely, she had been struggling to let him achieve even more than that. The backlash from cherishing him too much had made him grow up spoiled, but everything she had done was for Alfonso's sake.
"I'll... do whatever you want."
"I'm kidding. You think I'd blackmail you over something like this?"
"......"
"That's a little harsh. For a relationship that involves cheating, you sure don't have much faith in me."
Massaging her chest as he spoke, Valdes found himself thinking that, whatever he had done up until now, her behavior made his own actions seem almost unbelievable.
Of course, Katarina did have feelings for him. Since the first day she met Valdes, she had never once come to dislike him. Not even a little. Even when he suddenly started touching her breasts, that remained true. That was how deeply Katarina had already come to cherish him, harboring feelings that were close to love.
She simply couldn't show that affection the way she did with Marc.
But the fact that Valdes was a foreigner, and part demon by blood, made it hard for her to trust him even while liking him. On top of that, at present, she valued her husband and son over him, which also affected the matter.
"I don't really want much. Just a few little things."
"...Tell me what they are."
After a brief hesitation, she opened her mouth carefully.
"Let me call you by your name."
"Wh-what...?"
"You're a woman with the name Katarina before you're the queen of this country, aren't you? I like the name Katarina more than a distant-sounding title like 'Queen.'"