Put the Princess to Sleep
“Your Majesty.”
“I’ve heard.”
The Chief Steward had begun with care, but Karl cut him off in a handful of words.
“Evangeline showed that madness again, I take it.”
“……Yes.”
He had been delaying the answer, cold sweat beading on him, and in the end he had no choice. The last of it left him with a tremor in his voice.
“…I see.”
Karl did not grow angry. It was no one’s fault, and the feeling wrenching through him was not one he could spill on anyone. Propriety demanded he choke it down alone, and let it cool where no one could see.
The Chief Steward knew that. It was why, late as it was, he could not keep from giving the answer that made his flesh shake. Even so, there was something else he still had to do — as a retainer of the royal house, and as Chief Steward of the royal house of Failon.
“…If I may be so bold, Your Majesty.”
Karl’s shoulder flinched. It lasted only an instant, but it was enough to stop the steward’s mouth.
The man folded his fear away and spoke again.
“……The princess, as she is — we cannot send her to Polaris like that.”
“If you knew the words were presumptuous, perhaps you ought not to have said them.”
The reply came razor-cold, and drove in beneath the Chief Steward’s Adam’s apple.
His mouth shut on reflex.
“…Forget it. I said something useless.”
“Please don’t say that.”
The edge in Karl’s voice sheathed itself. The Chief Steward let a soundless sigh of relief out, slow, and into that quiet Karl’s words arrived.
“I know it myself. Send Eva to Polaris like that, and…”
“…”
“…something ill will come of it, in one form or another. That much, at least, is plain fact, is it not?”
Tap, tap. Karl drummed the table lightly with a fingertip — a habit of his, the one that surfaced whenever he sank deep into thought.
“…As I thought. I cannot send Eva to Polaris alone.”
The finger stopped dead.
“Lord Cornwall’s daughter. How old would she be this year?”
“……A bodyguard? To Princess Evangeline?”
“That is correct.”
At the Chief Steward’s words, Delphina Cornwall, eldest daughter of Count Cornwall, asked it back, bewilderment written plain across her face. She had come at a run on a summons from the palace that bore nothing but the mark of top secret, and once his explanation was finished, doubt was the first thing to rise in her.
“But isn’t Princess Evangeline the second strongest knight in our whole kingdom?”
“That is also true.”
“And a raw novice like me is supposed to guard someone like that? Wouldn’t I only get in her way…?”
“It is absolutely necessary.”
So saying, the Chief Steward rose.
With crisp, disciplined motions he drew every curtain in the room. In the chamber, now far darker than a moment before, he spoke slowly.
“…What I am about to tell you is treated, even within the palace, as the most secret of secrets.”
“…Top secret?”
Delphina swallowed before she knew she meant to. It was a dry click in her throat.
“You are free to refuse the offer even after you have heard everything, Lady Delphina. But in that case, you must forget completely all that you hear in this room.”
The Chief Steward’s monocle, set in a thin ring of gold, flashed like a hawk’s eye.
“This must not leak outside. Not under any circumstances. Do you understand?”
“……Yes.”
Trembling, Delphina nodded, slow.
“Good.”
He nodded in turn and drew from his breast something small and shaped like an egg.
“That’s…?”
“A mana barrier generator. It raises a translucent barrier inside this room and shuts out every kind of eavesdropping and remote surveillance from beyond it.”
A bead of sweat slid down Delphina’s brow.
This was serious. Far too serious. Had she agreed too quickly? Would the wiser answer have been to say, even now, that she needed to think again? Was she about to spend the rest of her life inside anxiety and watchful eyes? A whole swarm of thoughts like that gnawed at her.
And then the story that left the Chief Steward’s mouth struck like a blow.
“…The princess suffers from a sickness of the mind.”
“…………Pardon?”
Delphina blinked.
“The illness is a madness with no known cause. In a spotless room that smells of nothing at all, she will insist she smells blood and have dozens of fresheners brought in. She cannot manage a proper sleep. Several times a day she is seized by nightmares, and at the worst of it, she screams.”
Delphina was too stunned to answer. While her lips worked uselessly, opening and closing on nothing, the Chief Steward went on in a level voice.
“Recently, according to a maid who witnessed it, she smashed a perfectly sound wardrobe to pieces while offering some impossible reason… If I may venture a guess, that too was nothing other than another outbreak of the same madness.”
“…Then I—”
Delphina barely got her mouth open.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“I am told your father is a priest, Lady Delphina.”
“Yes. He serves a minor god of the land…”
“By any chance, can he also wield divine arts of the sort that forcibly calm the mind, or put their target to sleep?”
“Ah — yes.”
Delphina twitched, half rising from her seat.
“If that’s what you want, I can bring my father right now—”
“No.”
The Chief Steward shook his head at once. Then he looked straight into Delphina’s eyes and said, low:
“You yourself must know how to use it.”
“…Me?”
“The guard duty I wish to ask of you, Lady Delphina, is this. Should Lady Evangeline show the same madness as before, you are to remain at her side at all times, so that you may put her to sleep on the spot.”
“…”
“The term is three months. Before she leaves the kingdom to attend the entrance ceremony of Polaris Academy, you must succeed in mastering a divine art strong enough to put Princess Evangeline fully to sleep.”
“Th-three months…?”
“If you succeed, you will be permitted to enroll at Polaris as Princess Evangeline’s bodyguard, and as a special admit of Polaris Academy.”
“Me… to Polaris? But is that the sort of thing anyone can simply decide?”
“The kingdom will find a way, whatever it takes. The matter has already been settled with Polaris Academy. All that is required of you, Lady Delphina, is to devote every effort to learning the divine art.”
“…And that’s what they told me. And still.”
Delphina sat slumped against a great spreading tree, a wild squirrel caught by the tail and dangling upside down from her hand, and muttered it to no one.
“Perfect command of the Divine Art of a Single Dream in three months? There’s no way that’s possible.”
She let out a heavy sigh.
“I can’t dump all of it on Dad, and Mom is…”
The words trailed off. She looked up at the sky.
Not a scrap of cloud in it, and today, of all days, it seemed nothing but blue.
“Ugh. This is annoying.”
She flung the squirrel in her hand up at the sky. It sailed into the air, spun through a few tight circles, came down neatly on all fours, and fled.
“…Hah.”
“You are the only hope.”
“Lady Delphina Cornwall.”
The Chief Steward’s last words rang on inside her head.
Past eyelids narrowed against the sun, her mother’s face went by, and Evangeline’s with it — her mother setting out for the battlefield with her face set hard, and the princess standing beside that woman, watching Delphina from far off with an expression too tangled to name.
Delphina stared blankly up at the sky, some strange look caught on her face. Then she groaned and shoved herself to her feet.
“Ah, to hell with it!”
She turned toward the small hut behind the tree and shouted.
“Dad! Teach me how to use divine arts!!”
“…You, of all people. I was hoping you wouldn’t come.”
I knew by now. Enough, at least, to know that this too was a hallucination. See a thing once, twice, three times, and you understand it whether you want to or not. Now and then I did wonder what in the world was wrong with my head. It hardly mattered.
“…Narcissa Cornwall.”
I turned my head, only a glance, and looked behind me.
A corpse with both arms severed was staring straight at me.
“What. You here to push me?”
I huffed a thin little laugh, turned my face forward again, and forced her phantom out of my sight.
Below the window of the bowed-out terrace there was no floor. Only a deep, dense forest — the woods set aside as private land of the palace. In the season when the predators and the mountain beasts thinned, part of it was opened so the kingdom’s people might come and go, but for now it was shut.
A thought came, unbidden. If I fell from here, would I die?
“Might not even die, funny enough. Four years of that bullshit, and I’m still walking around in one piece.”
I muttered it, mocking myself, and looked back again.
“Aren’t you curious, Narcissa?”
The corpse did not answer. Below the jaw there was a hollow, as if something had torn it out, but that did not seem to be why she wasn’t speaking. I had seen it clear as anything — a ghost whose jaw hung dangling, and still talked just fine.
“No? Can’t push me, is that it? No arms?”
I laughed under my breath and lowered my head.
Narcissa Cornwall. Dead in the Third Defense of Roubille. Once the Fourth Seat of the Seven Swords of the Kingdom. Across from her had stood Ripinoste of the Ten Blades, Seventh Corps Commander of the Demon Army, and Ortega the One-Leg, assault captain of that same Seventh Corps.
It was the first battle I entered after the Combat Prosthetic Arm was fitted and the rehabilitation fully finished, so I remembered it with perfect clarity. From the beginning to the end. All of it.
Anyone might have hated me for it. She had every right.
If I had only been a little more used to the Combat Prosthetic Arm, she might not have died. No — she would not have died. Narcissa’s right arm would never have been ripped away in Ortega’s teeth, and her jaw would never have been sheared off by Ripinoste’s saw-blade. There would have been no need for my own hand to run the two of them through at once. That was how it would have gone. It had to have gone that way.
“…So could you not look at me with those eyes.”
Words that would never take. I ran my mouth with them anyway.
“I am reflecting on it, you know?”
A lie. I was not reflecting nearly enough. I was only afraid of the ghost in front of me, and throwing out whatever might make it leave a little sooner. And so, of course, the ghost before my eyes did not disappear.
Right. Better to get used to it. So that once I reached Polaris Academy, I would not be dragged about by hallucinations like these. I had to do well there. I had to show every last one of them that I was.