Yuliana von Valentine (1)
"This can't be."
Yuliana muttered it, her voice uncharacteristically shaken.
"Bill No. 421 got caught? How in the world?"
Bill was the name Yuliana von Valentine gave the tracking Shadow Dolls under her command, taken from a puppy she had raised as a child. A tracking Shadow Doll was an avatar split from the shadow spirit bound to her, and since the day of that contract she had brought four hundred and twenty-one of them into being. Some had been discovered. Not a single one had ever been destroyed.
"...So the title of Princess Knight isn't an empty name after all."
She forced a show of composure over the words and murmured them to herself.
Knock, knock.
Almost in that very same instant, a knock came from beyond the door.
"Eek!"
"Sister? Are you in there?"
Yuliana, who had clapped a hand over her own mouth without realizing it, cleared her throat in silence.
"C-come in."
"Pardon the intrusion."
Oscar stepped into the room and spoke.
"Um, Sister."
"What is it?"
Oh. It was only Oscar. Answering him so, she let her guard halfway down and raised the teacup to her lips.
That was a mistake.
"My fiancée has come to see you."
"Pfft—!"
At the words that followed, Yuliana coughed on pure reflex, and the tea in her cup sprayed in a messy scatter across the table.
"S-Sister?"
At nearly the same moment there seemed to be a thud from outside, but Oscar decided he would pay it no mind.
"Are you all right?"
"I-I am fine. I merely... swallowed the wrong way."
On the surface she held her calm together by force, but inside her head the place had already gone to riot.
The Princess Knight came here? Why?! Don't tell me she caught on that I sent a Shadow Doll. No. Impossible. You can't pull information out of a Shadow Doll. They're simple puppets, with neither personality nor intelligence. There's no way she could know it was me. Right—stay calm. The worst hasn't happened. She didn't come for that. She only came to see me.
...Then why, of all moments, does she want to see me now?! It's suspicious!
"Y-your fiancée, you mean? It should be fine. She is the Princess Knight herself. Meeting her once would hardly..."
It is not fine! I don't want to! How could it possibly be fine?! I won't see her! Tell her to go back!
Inwardly she was sobbing and shrieking at the unfairness of it, but she could hardly refuse to receive the betrothed her own brother had brought to her door. Right. She would glance at the girl's face, pretend to be tired, and send her off at once. Yes.
"Princess, you may come in."
Oscar said it with a glance toward the door, and the handle turned with a creak. The door opened with a clack. Beyond it stood a woman with long ashen-platinum hair let down her back.
Yuliana was rather startled. This was nothing like the Princess Knight she had pictured, nor the one she knew from the photographs in the papers.
Not the brilliant gold that symbolized the Failon royal house, gleaming as if it might flash, but platinum hair faded of every color, brittle and dry. Where her left forearm ought to have been, a silver prosthetic had been fitted in its place, imitating a human limb with disquieting fidelity. And two eyes sunk deep beneath heavy dark circles, fixed on Yuliana without once looking away, as though they saw straight through every last thing about her.
That is the Princess Knight?
Planting an informant as far as the battlefield where she had fought had been impossible to begin with, and when the woman lost her arm and briefly moved to the kingdom's capital, the guard around her had been so tight that no one could get near. Word in the Empire was that Oscar, alone as an exception, had gone to see her for a short while—yet after returning from the kingdom he had said nothing at all, and shut himself back inside the Mage Tower. Even Yuliana's father, the Emperor himself, could not meddle in the Mage Tower as he pleased, so the imperial leadership had, for all practical purposes, no means whatsoever of learning the Princess Knight's true condition. And the moment the war ended, she had secluded herself within the royal palace without ever showing her face to the people of the kingdom.
Even when Yuliana had let a shadow-ear dangle beneath the terrace to eavesdrop on that voice, she had thought the hoarseness only temporary—the price of talking with too many people.
"A pleasure to meet you."
A voice cracked and splitting at the seams turned toward her.
"I am Evangeline Failondia, Second Princess of the Failon Kingdom."
"...I-I am Yuliana von Valentine. Oscar is always... imposing upon you."
She forced down a voice that would not stop trembling and bowed her head in return. That alone felt as though half her remaining strength had already drained away. And Oscar, wearing a perfectly guileless smile, chose that moment to make it worse.
"Then I'll step outside and wait."
Ah, no! Don't leave me alone with her!!
Yuliana screamed it in her heart and forced her mouth to open.
"M-must you really go out? She is hardly a stranger."
"Surely there are things only ladies can discuss among themselves? I'm a man, so I wouldn't really know."
There is no such thing, so please, don't go!
She wailed it inwardly. That voice never reached Oscar.
Whatever else she was, Yuliana was heir to the imperial throne, second in the Empire's order of power, and Oscar's older sister. If she had not meant to meet the girl, she should never have agreed—she could not make a disgrace of herself now.
"I'll leave you the room, so please speak freely, just the two of you."
Whether he knew the storm inside his sister or not, Oscar left with that amiable smile, and soon only Yuliana and Evangeline remained.
Silence. Evangeline was sipping, without a word, at an empty teacup.
"I heard it from Lord Oscar."
Seated, she said it quietly.
"I hear you have a talent for handling Shadow Dolls."
Caught...!
Yuliana felt her heart drop all the way down into her stomach. The woman had not even bothered to circle around the point. She had asked outright. For the first time in her life, Yuliana felt betrayed by Oscar. How dare he lose his mind over some mere woman and sell his own sister out.
A host of hideous imaginings flashed through her head. The one that claimed the greatest share was Evangeline reaching out with that left arm of steel and crushing her skull the way one squeezes a tomato.
"H-hiiik."
"...What did you just say?"
"Ah, it was nothing."
Yuliana racked her brain in desperation. The fear that Evangeline's vicious combat prosthetic might grind her skull like a blender and turn it into fruit juice was already, in her mind, ceasing to be mere fancy and hardening into established fact.
Evangeline, of course, was no psychopath, and there was no chance she would do any such thing. She had come only after hearing Oscar's explanations along the way—that his eldest sister, Princess Yuliana, was such a worrier by nature that she occasionally pulled stunts like this. Because he had gone so far as to tell her that much, Evangeline had no wish to make a great affair of it. Actually doing the woman harm would certainly sour things with Oscar, and there was the risk of it growing into a diplomatic incident besides.
Above all, Evangeline was sleepy.
She did not want to drag the talk out. All she meant to take away was something like a promise that this would not happen again, and that was why she had brought up the Shadow Dolls so bluntly. She had hardly thought about it. She only wanted to say what needed saying, briefly, and go home.
Yuliana had no way of knowing any of that. Turning it over and over in her head for some way to escape her foreordained gruesome death, she finally opened her mouth.
"...That's right. I set a Shadow Doll on you, Princess."
Snap.
Yuliana flicked her fingers, and the shadow lying unusually thick beneath her warped like pulled taffy. It stretched long, changed its shape, and rose out of the darkness as a doll in human form.
It was the birth of Bill No. 422.
"A trifling talent of mine. I can command my own shadow as though it were a doll."
She admitted it outright—that she had been the one to set the Shadow Doll on her. Evangeline asked again.
"...So why did you do that to me?"
"...It shames me to say, but if the person concerned is asking, then confessing would be the proper thing."
This was where the match would be decided. Yuliana drew one small, silent breath, put on the most troubled expression she could manage, and spoke.
"I grew worried over what sort of person my younger brother's future bride might be, and before I knew it..."
She performed an awkward smile and let the end of the sentence trail away. Hearing it, Evangeline asked in return.
"You must love your brother very much."
"Yes."
She's taken the bait!
The moment those words landed, Yuliana clenched a fist in her heart. By her own reasoning, Evangeline was in the same state as Oscar—utterly taken with the one to whom she was betrothed. And yet, because of that weakness of hers, the fact that she could not bear a child, Evangeline was wearing a coldness she did not feel and deliberately pushing Oscar away.
What matters is this. In her heart of hearts, Evangeline must truly love Oscar.
Her plan was to go on at length about the younger brother she adored, turn Evangeline's attention somewhere else, and make her forget the matter of the Shadow Dolls entirely. And, as a bonus, to score a few points with the fiancée her brother loved. Brimming with certainty, Yuliana spoke with a triumphant air.
"Yes. Since the subject has come up, if I might say a little about Oscar..."
"Ah. No need for that."
"Wha—?"