At the Moon Tower - 4
All smiles.
It was a rather curious sight, catching Adrian smiling to herself like that from time to time. She wasn't looking my way, but she seemed to have taken our earlier conversation quite to heart.
Truthfully, I hadn't promised friendship—I had merely agreed to answer whenever she called. What was so delightful about that? And yet Adrian's interest in me was genuinely unexpected. With as little time as I had spent in her company, I'd never imagined she would react to me this way.
Friend. Coming straight from her lips, it was a word of considerable worth—even if whether she and I would truly grow that close remained an open question.
One thing, at least, seemed certain: Adrian's attitude was anything but ordinary.
"...I simply wanted to do it for you."
I didn't know what Adrian had seen in me. I had treated her no differently than anyone else; this was simply the first time I had formed a personal acquaintance with her. If a moment came when she was useful, I would use her. If a moment came when she needed to be discarded, I might well abandon the Saintess without a second thought.
My purpose, above all else, was the act of treason that would kill the Crown Prince. Since I had no way of knowing how the Saintess would feel about that, I needed to approach her with caution for the time being. Besides, it was not as though she stood any chance of being entangled in a charge of treason and dying for it. My intentions could hardly be called pure, and that was precisely why every smile Adrian flashed left me with an odd feeling in my chest. Had we been bound together by ill fate instead, I would have exploited her without mercy—finding myself in a situation where even that wasn't so, I laughed wryly to myself.
"Will Her Highness the Princess be arriving soon?"
"You said you had something to tell Mirazen, didn't you? She should be along shortly. I gave her a slightly different time, you see."
It was amusing, the reason she'd given a different time being so that she could speak with me—but Adrian looked so thoroughly pleased with herself that I let it pass without comment.
Perhaps I should settle my thoughts. What was my true purpose in coming here? Nothing more, and nothing less, than to speak with the Princess. I had, admittedly, swelled my schedule for this winter beyond what I'd intended, but in the end, meeting the Crown Prince through the Princess remained my chief aim.
Cultivate a rapport with Her Highness, and in the course of it, dangle a subject tempting enough to whet the Crown Prince's appetite. That was what I was angling for—and, in all likelihood, the shape the coming conversation would take.
"By the way, how did you come to meet Lady Adele?"
I had been lost in thought for some while when Adrian's question scattered my musings. How, exactly, was I supposed to answer a question about how I'd met Adele? I had made a point of not bringing her up in Adrian's presence, so this persistent probing struck me as a little surprising. If theirs were an awkward relationship, she wouldn't have asked at all—there seemed to be something at play that I didn't understand.
After a moment's deliberation, I told her everything except the matter of the wound on my neck. That I had slipped out midway through the ball and happened upon Adele by chance—a story of that much should raise no trouble.
Adrian gave a small nod, then answered with her shoulders drooping.
"So it wasn't me who met you first, after all. And here I'd been quietly relieved about it."
"Lady Adele mentioned that she'd met you as well, Saintess. Is your relationship perhaps not a good one?"
"...It isn't bad. No, it's not bad at all."
A curious answer—but Adrian didn't stop there, pressing on.
"There are simply people who are difficult to get along with, however briefly you've known them. With some, like Mirazen or Lord Taylor, my heart falls easily into accord—whereas Lady Adele's presence is something I find hard to bear."
"And your heart is in accord with mine?"
"Lord Taylor."
At my impish question, Adrian flushed red and pursed her lips into a pout. Watching her sulk with her eyes shut tight, I smiled faintly.
At some point, I had come to define this woman purely by her title of Saintess—but it seemed that notion needed revising. For a Saintess, her air was not oppressively solemn. If anything, she was mostly lighthearted, even given to moments of endearing scatterbrainedness—yet when it came to her own affairs, she was a woman who carried herself with all the grace befitting her station.
As the image of Adrian I had painted in my mind gradually shifted, she composed her expression and took up the thread of conversation once more.
"Please, think of it just that way. Lady Adele likely doesn't find me comfortable company either, so each of us simply has something that doesn't suit the other."
"I see."
Adele's expression had been equally unreadable whenever the Saintess came up. Though the notion of sensing something the instant one laid eyes on a person didn't quite resonate with me, the two women's accounts matched—and so it could hardly be a lie.
And so I asked nothing further. The one I awaited would arrive before long, and so I passed the time in that manner, letting my heart grow calm.
How much time had passed? Just as a brief silence settled over us, an attendant by the name of Yurika spoke.
"Her Highness the Princess has arrived. Shall I open the door?"
"Please do. And do not forget to tell her that I have been waiting."
The sound of the attendant opening the door reached my ears, and soon after, I sensed the clear, delicate click of heels drawing near. I knew full well who made that sound, and so I quietly fixed my gaze on the direction from which the woman would appear.
"Adrian, I hear someone wishes to meet me?"
"Here is Lord Taylor. He said he had something to tell you."
It was one of the few voices that still remained in my memory. A voice I had heard sometimes in a shared bed, sometimes on the scaffold, sometimes atop a horse. A voice that wrapped around the ear like velvet, forever bewitching—of all the people I had ever known, only one had possessed it.
When I lifted my bowed head, golden eyes brimming with questions met mine. Eyes beholding a person they were seeing for the very first time today—eyes utterly unfamiliar to me.
This was why I despised regression. I knew everything about that person, while she herself knew nothing whatsoever about me.
But this was a ritual I could not escape. Whenever I met the Princess after dying and waking again, there was a greeting I had always offered.
There had been a woman who marveled at the existence of a man within the Moon Tower. Her name was Mirazen de Artein.
To the woman who had been my lover of the past, my executioner, and my nemesis—
"It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I am Robert Taylor."
And so, I offered my one hundred and first greeting.
"You said you wished to meet me. I never imagined you would be acquainted with Adrian."
"Under ordinary circumstances I should have called on you directly, but circumstances conspired otherwise. I apologize."
"I'm hardly ill-tempered enough to demand an apology over something like this. Besides, Adrian thinks rather well of you, so there's no need."
Even so, astonishment was plainly written across the Princess's face as she looked me over. I had watched this reaction enough times to grow sick of it—enough to see straight through to how Mirazen regarded me.
The reason for that expression was, no doubt, my reputation. My reputation... I was watching with some interest to see just how long that rumor would keep circulating. I was conducting myself differently now, in my own fashion, but it would take considerable time for something spread once to fade away.
Adrian had withdrawn so that the two of us might talk, leaving the Princess and me alone together. What manner of bearing should I adopt in such a situation? The simplest approach, as ever, was to raise a subject we could both discuss.
Setting down my teacup, I addressed Mirazen, who was studying me intently.
"You believe the Saintess thinks well of me, then?"
"Well, yes. If Adrian thought poorly of you, she would never have summoned you to the Moon Tower. Come to think of it, this is the first time she's ever brought a man inside... You two aren't in some strange relationship, are you?"
"Of course not. She merely said she would observe me a while longer."
At those words, Mirazen blinked, held my gaze for a moment, then murmured, "So Adrian really does think well of him"—and soon after, her lips began to quiver. In those eyes, the emotion from that first moment burned sharper still, as though she were now measuring whether I and Robert Taylor were truly one and the same man.
...Not a single thing had changed.
After a regression, the surest way to confirm that time had truly turned back was to meet the Princess. I knew her ways better than anyone alive, and by reading the thoughts laid bare in her expression, I could tell that this was her first time meeting me.
The eyes rounding into wide circles. The mouth opening and closing, a hair's breadth from blurting out who are you? Even the expression straining to hold that question down. Nothing—nothing at all—had changed, and for no reason I could name, my mouth turned bitter.
From the very beginning, then. I called that word to mind and arranged my expression. It was better for me to believe that I was meeting the Princess for the very first time right now.
Mirazen studied me with a puzzled look for a moment, but soon cleared her throat and spoke.
"So—may I ask what it was you wanted to tell me?"
"I meant to speak with you about the proceedings of this Family Head Council."
At those words, her brow knotted. Only natural. What this council had taken up was the 'subjugation' of the South. Since it was a matter her own father had decided only days ago, my raising the subject anew would rub her wrong in more ways than one.
Whatever else might be said of her, Mirazen did not lack for political instinct. Eyes that had been idle a heartbeat before now glittered, and in the next instant they pierced through mine, cold as frost. She seemed to be searching for my true intent—but I had no need to bare my heart. I would, however, have to make the effort to raise the matter in earnest.
Straightening in my seat, I drew the map of the South from within my coat and spread it across the table.
"At the moment, I don't know what this is meant to signify."
It was a flat, toneless voice, yet a faint curiosity was threaded through it. She would be curious, of course—about the 'South,' raised by Robert Taylor, a son who lived at the mercy of his father's word.
I might well have appeared to endorse the subjugation, as my father had—but nothing could have been further from the truth. I had said I would manufacture a pretext to reach the Crown Prince. And the reason the imperial family had resisted the subjugation of the South was a simple one, was it not? The Emperor, the Crown Prince, and Mirazen—all of them viewed the matter with disfavor. Only because the nobles' opposition ran so fierce had the subjugation been ordered at all, and then only grudgingly. What the Crown Prince and Mirazen truly believed stood in exact opposition to that.
"Do you truly believe the subjugation of the South to be just?"
"...Lord Robert Taylor. I am asking you what this means."
I regarded Mirazen calmly as she glared at me in feigned anger. Knowing her temperament, she would have grasped long since what this map signified. A map bearing the South and the South alone, marked throughout with symbols. If she had recognized it as a chart of the distribution of the 'non-human races' dwelling in the South, then there could be only one thing I meant to say with it.
I held her gaze for a moment, then answered slowly.
"The grounds upon which one might oppose the subjugation of the South—would that not be the right answer?"
As for where I had obtained this—it was information Arwen had secured for me in a previous cycle. Leveraging my acquaintance with Mirazen as a means of approaching the Crown Prince was, after all, a method I had conceived of long ago. It had failed before it could ever be carried out, buried under a false charge of treason. But in this life, it might yet serve me well.
Mirazen's gaze remained fierce, but that brilliant light was slowly dissolving. Her wariness of me melted away, leaving behind only a soft look that weighed nothing but advantage. And when the upturned corners of her mouth at last curved into a smile, Mirazen spoke quietly.
"Adrian has made herself a fine friend."
"Then—would you care to hear it?"
"I would. And one thing more—let me tell you this before we begin."
"And that would be?"
At my question, the edge drained from Mirazen's face, and she answered with a sigh. She wore the look of someone whose common sense had been shattered in a single stroke.
"...That Robert Taylor is a man entirely unlike his reputation."
I wondered how to answer that, then simply shrugged and replied. The rumor had not been wrong, after all. Was it not, in effect, a portrait of the man I had been before my regression? But the man Mirazen now faced was Robert Taylor after a hundred deaths. One could hardly call the rumor strictly false.
"Well. The rumor may not necessarily be wrong."
"That's impossible."
Mirazen merely looked at me, her face pure incredulity. Perhaps I appeared to be lying. It hardly mattered—from the moment she had shown interest in what I brought, I could say with certainty that the purpose I had come with was fulfilled.
The longer I explained the map, the more visibly Mirazen sank into it. What manner of relationship would ours be, this time around? At times we had been bound by ill fate; at times, as lovers. Of what we would become now, I could not guess in the slightest.
I hoped only this: that she might remain in the future I intended to draw. Only then would the imperial line of this empire endure unbroken.
After the Crown Prince died, Mirazen had to become the Empress of this empire.
The Moon Tower stood closer to the moon than anywhere else in the world.
When the wind brushed her skin as though the moon itself were pressed against her, Adrian would slip into the illusion that she was gazing upon it with her own eyes. Of course, it was nothing more than an illusion, amounting to no more than a simple appreciation. The sensation of cool light gliding down over her body never ceased to feel new to her—for light, to her, existed only as brightness and shadow.
Tonight, Adrian thought, felt unusually dark. And yet why was she here? Had some strange pull not called to her and drawn her to the very crown of the Moon Tower?
Adrian called this sensation the voice of God. A feeling that guided her toward her destiny—though tonight, she could not tell what that voice was leading her toward.
Could it be that Lord Taylor had come to this place? Smiling faintly at the absurd thought, Adrian inclined her ear toward the crisp footsteps sounding nearby.
...Footsteps she had heard today—quite familiar ones. And when she realized whose they were, a wind rose without warning. A wind steeped in moonlight—cool, yet strangely gentle.