How to Strangle a Tiger - 4
The Evil Dragon was a being of legend.
A dragon that had appeared in the far-distant past and tried to steal the moon—the most feared dragon of legend in all the Empire. And yet I could not imagine why Arwen was speaking of it now.
Even granting that it had once truly existed, this was a legendary creature that had not shown itself for a full thousand years. These days, wasn't the prevailing mood to dismiss it all as fabrication?
In every one of my regressions, I had never once heard it said that the Evil Dragon was real—so I could only regard Arwen with a puzzled expression. What possible bearing could the legend have on the Crown Prince's mind clouding over?
"You seem to know about the Evil Dragon. Then this should be a little easier. It may look like there's no connection at all, but I actually believe the two are quite deeply linked."
"...Deeply linked—you're saying the Crown Prince has ties to the Evil Dragon?"
"As I said before, this is only conjecture drawn from my own investigation. It may not be accurate. It may be absurd nonsense entirely detached from reality. And yet... I'd say the likelihood is very high."
After a measured pause, Arwen laid a single sheet of paper on the table. I skimmed through it; it seemed to hold the fruit of her research. What stood out was the account of a mural housed in the Southern temple, and by the time I had finished studying it at leisure, Arwen spoke again.
"The Empire's moon is a peculiar thing. The full moon that rises on a once-monthly cycle everywhere else will, every so often, rise twice within a single month here. The Full Moon Festival is held to welcome that period."
"The Empire was born under the moon's blessing. I never thought to find it strange."
"...Long ago, when the Evil Dragon tried to steal the moon, Eden, God of the Moon, tricked it into stealing darkness instead. And so one dark moon vanished from the cycle, and a full moon settled into its place once more. I imagine you know that part of the legend."
The tale of the Evil Dragon was as widely told as any children's story. Even small children had heard it at least once, so I, too, could hardly avoid knowing it in detail. As I listened to Arwen, the Full Moon Festival rose in my memory, and I looked back down at the mural's contents. It made for fascinating reading—the mural reproduced the legend faithfully, yet carried, besides, a story that appeared in no version of the tale.
"...Malice?"
"The Evil Dragon died, but it was never wholly extinguished. The grudge it harbored was bound to keep growing, fed by its own will to survive."
"So now that it has died once, you're saying the malice it left behind has swollen all the larger."
"Perhaps beyond all reining in. I believe this very moment is when it has grown to its largest."
To my ears, Arwen was saying that the Crown Prince was being toyed with by the malice. But the blood of the imperial house was not the sort of thing to be buffeted about by a mere curse. The blood of the moon was not called such for nothing—it was the purest and most pristine, so clean that against any ordinary curse, its bearer could purify it simply by breathing. Even if it truly was the Evil Dragon's malice, surely the odds favored his enduring it on his own.
Arwen nodded at my doubt. But she seemed to have anticipated it, for she soon spoke up, one finger resting on another part of the mural.
"Bear the shadow and go forth—but never be swayed by the abyss."
"You deciphered the script inscribed on the mural?"
"I believe it speaks of the malice. The painting just before this inscription shows the Evil Dragon's death. Perhaps the meaning is... even if one comes to touch that malice, one must never be ruled by the madness it carries."
Taken at face value, it could certainly be read that way. But then why—why had the Crown Prince, connected to none of it, been exposed to the Evil Dragon's malice in the first place?
Arwen had an answer ready for the question I had just begun to hold.
"Keitel's goal is a far cry from His Majesty the Emperor's. Where the Emperor would preserve the present, careful balance between nobility and throne, Keitel intends to gather all power into the imperial family's hands."
"So that's why he created Icarus? To raise an organization that belonged to him alone?"
"Icarus existed long before him. Keitel simply twisted what it was for. He meant to build a power base of his own through it, most likely. And up to that point—up to that point, I'd wager, it was purely his own will."
Arwen exhaled a small sigh, then pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose as though her head ached.
Distilled to its essence, everything she had told me came to this: the Crown Prince was being swayed by the malice. And that malice, grafted onto the will he already carried, was stirring up matters that had no need of stirring. Which meant that everything yet to come would come because the Crown Prince's mind had been devoured by it.
But was it really so? No—I remembered the look in the Crown Prince's eyes. Eyes colder than anything alive, that showed no feeling whatsoever beyond frigid reason. That was one reason for my doubt, but in a dozen ways the story refused to be believed.
If he were being swayed by the malice, the Saintess would have sensed it before anyone. One who received her divine power directly from the gods would have perceived any sinister presence entwined about the Crown Prince. I knew she had met with him again only recently—and if even she had noticed nothing...
Then wasn't it rather more sound to conclude that no such malice clung to him at all?
When I raised the Saintess, Arwen allowed that she had weighed that possibility as well. Then what, if anything, connected the Crown Prince to the malice? At my question, Arwen answered with a furrowed brow, as if the mere thought hurt.
"...Perhaps it isn't the malice at all. It may not be that Keitel acts because the malice has consumed him—it may be that he means to use the malice itself."
She let the moment hang, then added, eyes shut tight,
"For the sake of the Evil Dragon's resurrection."
The Evil Dragon stood at the very opposite pole of the Empire. It had tried to steal the moon from the beginning, after all—hardly a being the Empire could ever accept. The imperial house had even tried once to wipe the Evil Dragon's name from history itself; one could rightly call it their absolute and sworn enemy.
...Which was exactly what made this so strange.
In the room where she was now the only one left, Arwen narrowed her eyes and gazed at nothing.
Everything else was conjecture. Even where materials existed, they were conjectures raised upon those materials, and could be wrong a hundred ways over. She had said as much and set the doubts aside—and yet one fact still remained, did it not?
The Crown Prince meant to make use of the Evil Dragon's existence.
Before she had walked out of Icarus, she had learned the Crown Prince's secret by sheer chance. It was the reason she had been hunted ever since—and the reason she had very nearly died. What would have become of her, back then, if a man named Robert Taylor had not appeared?
She would most likely be dead. Those assassins, corpses themselves by now, would have cut her down and buried her in some place no living soul would ever find.
However many times she turned the memory over, it chilled her to the bone—and yet, in another corner of her mind, it raised a question besides. How exactly had Robert Taylor learned of that ambush?
"It was meant to be an absolute secret."
The Crown Prince would never have breathed word of that assassination to another. Even a duke with all his reach could not have pried it loose—so how had he, a son all but cast off even by his own house, come to know it?
And wasn't he a far different man from the one she had known? The first time she laid eyes on him, she had genuinely suspected him someone else in disguise. The Robert Taylor her old investigations had turned up was, by nearly every account, a gentle soul—one could have called him the very model of a good person.
He had been famous for mourning the deaths of mere beasts and for doting on the people around him. No matter how many "punishments" the family meted out to him, his nature never once soured. Once or twice he had nearly strayed down a twisted road, but it never lasted long—and Arwen knew well that a good share of the rumors now making the rounds were heavily embellished. The gossip held him a wastrel and, for all that, a weakling; in truth, Robert Taylor had been nothing more than a good man. The only problem was that his temperament was gentle to a fault—gentle enough to be used by others again and again.
And so, even face to face with the Robert of today, she could only doubt, time after time, whether this was truly the same person. How could a man change so thoroughly? As though he had hidden his real nature his whole life—his eyes, hollow where they had not been before, sat uneasily on her mind.
It might have been an act all along. Might he not have been preparing, all this while, to change his ways completely the moment his time came? Strength enough to kill four assassins single-handed is not grown in a day. For Robert—born and raised without once taking up a sword—to wield such power... just how many hours of training must have gone into it? If he truly had prepared every last thing in secret, it was nothing short of staggering. As though he had foreseen this entire situation from the start. He had turned aside his own assassination, and had even arranged his journey south in advance.
— "The Evil Dragon's resurrection, of all things."
— "I can't say anything for certain just yet. I'll have to investigate further once I reach the South—the Temple of the Moon is a place only the Saintess may enter."
— "Then I'll look into it myself. I'll be heading south come winter."
To think he counted the Saintess among his acquaintances. Just recently, he had even traveled in the company of Grand Duke Igrit of the North. And yet the rumors continued to run against him all the same—despite the Grand Duke of the North and the Saintess both, and the name of Taylor standing behind him besides.
What was it he was after? Once the Crown Prince's head had been struck from his shoulders, what on earth did Robert Taylor imagine would come after?
If Robert Taylor proved cut from the same cloth as the Crown Prince, Arwen fully intended to stop him—even if it cost her her life. If he, too, had looked ready to summon blood the way Keitel did, she would have stopped him the very instant he swore once more that he would kill the Crown Prince. That was why she had asked for his reason. Why did he mean to kill the Crown Prince?
She had assumed this was a coup for power and nothing more. The answer that returned was the last thing she had expected.
— "...Because I have died far too many times."
Arwen's expression turned odd as she recalled that moment—the sudden clouding of his eyes. They had been calm when he killed the assassins. Calm even when he declared he would kill the Crown Prince. So utterly unmoved that she had nearly believed them a doll's—hollow eyes, as if carved in place.
But when he said that, they were different. They wavered, laden with feeling past counting. She had been unable to answer a face that looked ready to collapse, ready to shatter on the spot. Sorrow. Hatred. Regret. Lingering attachment. Unable to name what else moved in them, she had abandoned her answer entirely and simply told him everything she knew instead...
The instant she saw those eyes, belief was no longer hers to refuse. As far as she knew, the only person who had ever died at Robert's side was his mother—but what he carried in his heart had been the truth.
What wind, she wondered, would the words she had loosed today end up summoning?
Robert had likened the Crown Prince to a tiger. And then he had called her one who would know how to strangle a tiger's throat. What did he know, to say such a thing? It was as if he understood everything about her—as if the two of them had known each other for a very long time.
Groaning quietly, Arwen finally eased herself out of the chair and walked to the window. By rights, that sky should have been the last she ever saw. Yet she had been saved, and here she lived still. What would this salvation come to mean for her? Arwen simply gazed at the sky, blank.
The wind was rising.
From far off, the current flowing down from the north grew fiercer as winter approached—cold, biting, the kind of wind that stripped away every last trace of warmth a body held, if only for a moment. She stood against it briefly; then at length she closed the window and latched it shut.
"Keitel. Robert."
She knew nothing of what bitter history lay between the two men. What she found curious, rather, was that both of them were aiming for the other's throat.
Arwen smiled faintly as she stared into the dark. Perhaps that was why Robert had finally begun to move. Because he had realized that Keitel meant to kill him one day—and so he, too, meant to strike first.
But how on earth had he come to know such a thing?
Back when she had learned that the Crown Prince meant to use the Evil Dragon's existence, one order had come down to her in that same season: uncover everything there was to know about Robert of House Taylor. Everything she knew of him now still came from that investigation—and it was through it that she had understood the Crown Prince's interest lay upon Robert Taylor. And that one day, he would kill him.
Just what did Robert Taylor have? Arwen worried at it a moment, then soon shook her head as though to say it was beyond her. It was not hers to know. Just as Robert had said—all she needed was to keep her hands fixed on the Crown Prince's throat.
The breath that left her again came heavy.
"...Only an eternity of time can endure the dawn that draws near."
Recalling the mural's final line, she gazed off into the empty air.