“I am a Regent with full authority, so ask adult matters of an adult.”
“But you are not a king yourself, merely a duke. Why do you not receive me with proper courtesy?”
I threw a silver coin.
I could have thrown it with all my strength and struck her in the forehead, but then it would have made an air hole through the back of her head, so I did not.
If I threw a gold coin, it would have been a Gold Strike, but I did not wish to grant her gold-grade treatment.
Nor did I possess anything below silver coins.
“What are you doing?”
Perhaps realizing that this was no ordinary treatment, her already sharp tone rose higher.
“Is there anything greater than this as courtesy toward a beggar? Is it not enough?”
“What?!”
“Did you not come to beg for a country and land?”
“You call reclaiming rights begging?”
“Asking for what one has no right to is called begging.”
“If you believe you can insult me and send me away, you are mistaken.”
“If enduring insult while holding out one’s hand is not called begging, what is it called?”
“The Grand Duke of the North’s insolent expression has not changed, I see. So you are loyal to the late King, just as they said...... And that sword is the Frost Sword, too. You cherish it, do you not? It must be a relic of the late King.”
She stared fixedly at the Frost Sword, so I merely nodded.
Then, seeing her chance, she began to chatter.
“Nothing the late King used was without value. Then how much more valuable would his wife be? Her nobility is beyond words, is it not?”
For an argument of her own making, she was advancing a rather filthy logic, sticking out her tongue slightly. Her beauty had not faded, but her smudged makeup and Imperial adornments were utterly ugly.
By that sort of logic, since it had been used by a king, it would be right to bury her alive with him.
“Then I shall bury you with the late King. But I will cut out that wicked tongue and dry it well first.”
I knew that she had once tried to poison the late King through a kiss.
Her beauty had not faded, and she still had the appearance of a bewitching creature.
“Ahahahaha, it would mean nothing.”
“Since you did not bring the Princess, I can deal with you all the more lightly. If you came to talk, observe manners.”
“Do you intend to talk?”
“You must cross the line a little further before it would be worth tearing you to death, so I intend to draw out insults through words. Naturally, we must exchange words.”
“You are a steadfast man. It would have been good if you had accepted my proposal.”
As though she had stopped raving, she offered a diplomatic phrase of praise, but it was not much of a compliment.
“I have not regretted rejecting it a single time.”
“I heard that, after losing your wife so, you wanted a woman who had borne a child.”
“Your new husband does not seem to want a woman who has borne a child so badly.”
“Is it proper to mock a woman with such words!?”
Oh, it seemed I had struck a nerve this time.
Look at her raising her voice again.
“Are you mocking our master!?”
And the escort knight, who had allowed this bitch’s presumptuousness until now, stepped forward as though he would draw his sword.
What a laughable fellow.
I stepped one pace forward as well and struck him across the face.
“Kuh?”
“Come at me if you wish. I will have you return on one leg, with heads hanging all over you for that bitch to see.”
These were the knights of the Grand Duke of Feltkirch, the deposed Queen’s new husband, who had gathered forces near the administrative district under the Kingdom’s northern control.
Even if the deposed Queen was spared because the Empire stood behind her, I had calculated that I could send all of them back dead, if not for the Kingdom’s honor.
“Ah, ah, ah. Do not commit discourtesy. Yes, Grand Duke of the North. I came in grand fashion, but I do not intend to stay long, so let us speak.”
“I am pleased.”
“Pleased?”
At that one word, Elined’s raised voice lowered, and her manner of speech became gentler.
It seemed that even a mad person could imitate a normal one.
Was she truly mad?
Everyone in the Kingdom cursed that no one who was not mad would behave like that, so she might simply be showing a mad appearance to match it.
According to how one was acknowledged by others, a person was bound to change to meet those expectations.
“How could I not be pleased, when your saying you will not stay long sounds like God’s salvation?”
Of course, I had no intention of sympathizing with her.
Even so, it was amusing that a single expression of pleasure, spoken merely to toy with her, made her soften.
“Please lead me somewhere we can converse.”
“It was your home, so you should know.”
She seemed to have stopped raving, so I received Elined.
The nobles inside the royal castle were gathered by their respective groups and conversing, so I called her to my office.
The former Queen Elined began provoking me as soon as she entered.
“The Princess is not the true Queen.”
“Ha?”
“Enthrone Princess Aisia according to bloodline. Otherwise, we have the right to put forth the rightful Queen.”
“The royal bloodline has been recognized by the Frost Sword, the Royal Regalia. Cut that crap.”
“You believe a sword’s words?”
“It is more honest than people’s words. No, the words of any liar are more worth remembering than yours.”
[If you are that grateful, train with me......]
I did not answer.
I did not know why a sword with such a splendid background—that it was the Royal Regalia and chose its master—was so clingy.
“I did not expect much, but this cannot be denied. Princess Aisia Palatina is the Queen’s lawful heir. That will be so under your laws as well.”
“Her mother’s conduct is ugly, and she behaves as though she cannot live without men. How can I trust this? She is a child born of a woman who acted to kill her husband. How about smearing that child’s blood on the Frost Sword and testing her?”
“Even defying God’s will?”
The prohibition against guilt by association was a good doctrine of the Church of the Holy Spirit.
Of course, it was not impossible to saddle a child with a crime like rebellion. One only needed to drive the conclusion that the child was also guilty and charge her with that crime.
“If you say that killing one’s child and husband is receiving God’s will, then you should be whipped soundly so that you do not impersonate God.”
“Ha, should we truly reinvestigate the truth? A mother may be mad...... Yes, she might wish to suffocate her husband with a pillow. But she killed the son who could more easily assert a claim to royal authority, then acted like this?”
“Your appearance has already settled my judgment. Your conduct after the incident was suspicious.”
“No, you will understand if you think it through. Yes, I will not deny that my father, the Emperor, covets this country at every opportunity. But do not disregard a mother’s will to kill the husband who killed her child and be rid of him like this. Do I truly look mad?”
The death of the late King’s legitimate son, the prince, was an incident whose culprit varied according to political position.
The Kingdom had settled on the position that ‘the deposed Queen, that madwoman, had undertaken an assassination and a pretext-building operation to wipe out the royal family’s bloodline entirely.’
The Empire judged that ‘the late King had killed his own child in order to cut off the Imperial bloodline, discard the Queen, marry his hidden mistress, and pass the throne to her child.’
However, after that, the deposed Queen and Imperial-aligned forces attempted to assassinate the late King and tried to instigate a fire at the royal castle.
Incidents that made the Kingdom’s position seem correct occurred one after another, lending weight to the view that the deposed Queen had tried to kill her son and husband.
Conversely, it was certain that the late King had suffered a great shock after his son’s death.
For that reason, the Kingdom’s position generally carried more weight.
There had been kings in history who discarded even their children in order to replace their queens. The late King had actually improved for a time after marrying the Queen’s birth mother, so from the perspective of people unrelated to the matter, suspicion was evenly divided.
But because the deposed Queen went about doing such mad things, the conviction that she might commit parricide shifted toward her.
“You look mad.”
“You believed me in the past.”
“Your conduct is like that.”
I did not believe the position that the deposed Queen had killed her own son, but I supported it.
If it was something that could not be known anyway, I drew the line according to my actual standing and the national interest.
Could a parent kill their own child? It was possible, but I supported the late King, so he could not have done it.
Still, it was difficult for the deposed Queen to do so as well, unless she was mad.
‘She does look mad, though.’
More precisely, I believed it to be the work of radical factions that existed on both the Empire’s and the Kingdom’s sides.
‘Grand Duke, this is the only way to depose the Queen.’
There had certainly been a faction that had approached me with those words, though I had refused them.
Normally, when a child was harmed in the family, the parents were the suspects. But the people who benefited when this couple lost their child, tried to kill each other, and broke apart so extremely were not the couple.
But I knew nothing beyond that, so I simply regarded it this way: This woman killed her son, tried to kill her husband as well, and now intended to swallow the country’s wealth with her remaining daughter.
“Do you want me to behave even worse?”
“Seeing you now, one could almost think that you are waging even the current struggle for royal authority to claim that you were not the perpetrator of the rebellion at the time, or out of guilt for the son you killed. Maintain some dignity.”
“I know the Kingdom’s situation. That elite force is gone, is it not?”
“You mean that the Duke of the East took the Lion Unit.”
“Yes. Then how do you intend to stop us while behaving with such arrogance?”
“What do I have to fear from a widow, a brat, and an army of outsiders?”
“When you have only a few thousand in the royal capital? Do you think the Queen’s order to mobilize the Royal Domain and the nobles of the Palatina surname will bring them together?”
“You may invade if you wish. I will make you an uncanny widow who gets every husband killed.”
Normally, negotiations were meant to prevent war from breaking out, but there was no reason to do so here.
An invasion of the Kingdom by the former Queen and those who backed her had long been expected.
“Whew, if that is truly the case, give Princess Aisia the title of Duke Guardian of the Holy Land, the title of Count Master of the Crossroads, and command of the part of the Lion Unit she can rightfully receive.”
She was saying exactly the same thing as the Duke of the East.
They were political demands aimed at the fact that Her Majesty had no descendants.
And this was probably her true intention.
Who could fail to know how absurd it was to demand that we obey their laws as well?
They made an enormous unreasonable demand, then withdrew with relaxed conditions and made a show of having yielded greatly.
“That cannot be accepted either. Until Her Majesty marries, Her Majesty will take the Duke of the East’s daughter as her goddaughter and raise her as successor to the throne.”
“Huh? What?!”
This was a proposal that would satisfy even the Duke of the East, so long as he gave up the first child he had gained only with difficulty after six years of marriage for his ambition.
At the thought of taking her cousin as a daughter and securing the succession, she also seemed at a loss for words.
Originally, a successor was determined by succession law, but also came to be determined by the monarch’s will in this way.
“It is not as though there is no way, if you wish it.”
The moment Elined was at a loss for words, an amusing idea occurred to me.
“War?”
“If you hang yourself here, I will have Princess Aisia Palatina renounce her right of succession to the Imperial throne, then treat her as an heir to the Kingdom’s throne and protect her in the Kingdom.”
There was no problem with her being first in line.
Once Her Majesty came of age and had children, that rank would naturally be pushed down.
When young kings without descendants ascended the throne, it was proper for their siblings to temporarily hold priority in the succession, then humbly step aside when a firstborn niece or nephew was born.
Therefore, no matter how her biological mother behaved, there was no reason we could not raise Princess Aisia, who was still the late King’s daughter.
But.
We had to cut off the Imperial bloodline that would use the child as a puppet and seek to plunder sovereign power.
The root of it was the Emperor, but the one meddling in the middle was the current Deposed Queen Elined.
“Ha, hahahahahaha ahahahaha. Are you serious? Very well...... If you make that declaration about my daughter first at the coronation, I can hang myself.”
She accepted this?
“Hang yourself first.”
“How can I trust you?”
“Would you rather I cut you? You clearly said that you could hang yourself.”
“Proclaim it. I will die there.”
“I swear to God.”
It was not a matter of outward appearances, but my faithfulness to any oath made to God was worth less than dog shit.
Until now, other than my oath to protect the late King’s daughter alone, I had not intended to keep, had not kept, and had not been able to keep any oath.
“Fine. What would there be to live for any longer?”
“Guards, bring chains and cloth. And have the knights of the Grand Duchy of Feltkirch come in as well.”
If she died while alone with me, it would become as though I had killed her.
There was no reason to assassinate this bitch alone, so it would be better for her to die in a public setting.
And she had no intention of dying, either.
“Do you intend to show my corpse to men?”
“I will see it myself, so what is there to fear?”
“Is courtesy necessary even after death?”
“Do not worry. If you take responsibility through suicide, your remains will be buried in the Sanctuary, and the highest honors are guaranteed to a body buried in the Sanctuary.”
“Ha? How very kind of you?”
“Ah, if you wish, I can have a poison mixed. Or would you prefer a dagger? This will be faster.”
When I threw her a dagger, she looked even more at a loss.