This man was not in a state where he would fail to avoid a sword like this.
He must have been severely cornered psychologically.
The Duke of the East, who had kept silent while sweating coldly, looked at my face and asked,
“Why...... are you smiling?”
Why would I not be pleased after seizing the weakness of the most powerful courtier in this country?
Moreover, though my abilities were developing as well, I had not expected to be able to see through the gaps of a tent at night.
I was improving and growing. How could I not be pleased?
“You seem a pathetic man...... Fine. I shall turn a blind eye to this on conditions. Let us leave this matter unspoken.”
“What have I done?”
“Would it be all right for me to mention it directly? If I do, then there will be no problem even if I send your head flying. I am only refraining because you have many supporters and the royal family is on the eve of a major event.”
In truth, I could not speak because I did not know exactly.
I had not been able to hear the sounds of their conversation at the time.
I had to rely on lip-reading—reading speech from their mouths—and on the movements of their lips.
However, judging by the lip-reading, their actions, and their gestures, the Duke of the East was being blackmailed by Elined, and that blackmail was accompanied by seduction.
Since loyalty to Her Majesty was mentioned in overcoming that blackmail, for now I intended to extract as much political value from it as I could.
“Tell me plainly what you know!”
Was he going to deny it to the end?
“In the Far East, there is a custom by which, when an elder brother dies, the younger brother takes his sister-in-law. I do not know why a knight sworn to the Church of the Holy Spirit follows heathen customs.”
Look at his eyes tremble.
Besides, I had not mentioned a grammatical subject or anything of the sort. I had merely given an example.
Even if I was wrong, I had a way out.
Upon hearing that, the Duke of the East collapsed into a seat, clutched at his hair, then waved his hand.
“Give me some time to think.”
“Do so.”
About ten minutes later, the Duke of the East, having arranged his thoughts, finally nodded.
“......Whew. Do as you please with the Lion Unit. It is much the same as them having fired me.”
“As expected, they did not listen to your words either.”
“I will go on the Eastern Campaign as well.”
“A good decision.”
“But could you wait until the newborn is weaned and another child is born? Taking away a child who has only just been born would be...... cruel.”
“Of course. I know that separating parents from their child is cruel. Instead.”
“Instead?”
He had refused one of the three conditions, so there was something additional that he had to accept.
***
It was not deep into the night, but it was evening, when a lamp had to be lit to see outside.
Hearing a presence outside the office of the Minister of Military Affairs, I called out,
“Who is it?”
“Um...... It is the Queen.”
“Who is playing a joke...... Your Majesty. Please come in.”
I thought a maid might be playing a joke, but of course no maid had the nerve to joke with me, and I recognized the young girl’s voice outside the door as Her Majesty’s. I immediately rose and opened the office door.
“I-I was not playing a prank. It was just an old habit......”
When I opened the door to welcome her, Her Majesty’s face instead turned red all the way to her ears in embarrassment.
She had not been joking. It seemed that, still frightened of me, she had unknowingly used honorifics despite having no need to do so.
It was possible that she had developed the habit because nobles exchanged honorifics with one another in the days when she was a princess, but Her Majesty had been born out of wedlock.
Before the Deposed Queen was expelled, she seemed to have grown up carefully watching others’ reactions.
“Not at all. Please treat this subject casually. It is my joy to serve Her Majesty as I served the late King.”
What could I do? I had to welcome her with a broad smile.
“It is not proper to seek you out at night, but......”
“State affairs have no day or night, and what a monarch does is the work of the state.”
“Is that allowed?”
“This subject will also come to see you at all hours and trouble you, but I believe Her Majesty will not take issue with it in your broad tolerance.”
“Ah, I see?!”
“That is so.”
Only now did her expression ease.
It seemed that when I said I would trouble her, she was reassured that she could trouble me as well.
Really.
The monarch was in a position to hound their subjects, yet she was like this.
“Then, would the Regent review this for me?”
Her Majesty abruptly held out a document before me.
The only clerical documents Her Majesty should have had would be reports related to the royal family and the Royal Domain’s finances, but this had very few of the numbers essential to finances.
She thrust it toward me, then, perhaps thinking she had held it too close to my eyes, took a step back while still holding it out.
She seemed to be thinking too deeply about my eyesight.
“I-if your eyes are not tired, that is......”
“Today I looked at several people instead of text, so I am all right.”
Wait, now that I thought about it, this was no different from ‘Help me with my homework.’
“Wh-why are you reacting like that?”
I thought of myself as a term-limited head of state entrusted with the power to oversee the affairs of the country, yet I had to check homework?
The situation was both amusing and absurd.
What Her Majesty had brought was none other than her first state address.
Unless it was a coronation or another grand national event, the sovereign would rarely give a briefing on state affairs in person. Yet she had written it down and was worrying over it.
“I think you wrote it well.”
I knew that Her Majesty had learned composition, so I left a state briefing to her thinking, ‘She can write it by herself.’
Even reading it now, the basic form and style were deep beyond what one would expect from a ten-year-old, and the vocabulary was good. It was not bad writing.
At an elementary-school writing contest, it would have won first prize.
That was true of the sentences, however. As for the content, it said nothing about what she would do or how she would do it, beyond that she would do well as queen.
I did not think a monarch could simply get by with vague, abstract resolutions to do well.
But what was there that Her Majesty could do right now?
I was the one running the country.
As a monarch under a Regency, she acknowledged her limits and omitted from the state briefing the things she could not specifically do. In that respect, she might even be called honest.
“My composition teacher said the same.”
“It seems you are not satisfied with that.”
“Yes. She said that it was well written, but that it was too vague and lacked a sense of purpose. I thought that did not seem to be praise.”
That fellow did not seem to be someone who merely flattered the Queen.
It seemed that I was not alone in feeling that way; the teacher who helped Her Majesty with composition had said the same.
Finally, Her Majesty herself seemed to feel that something was lacking after writing it.
“This sort of state briefing is, in truth, something this subject may take on. Do not worry. There is not much time left, but if you can memorize it, I will write it again and bring it to you.”
She had said she was good at composition, so I had more or less dumped the task on her.
As the person with ultimate responsibility for state affairs, it was right that I should make known my political views on the direction and tasks of government until Her Majesty came of age.
Of course, there was no particular reason for me to do it personally.
Usually, an official who writes well, such as an Administrative Officer, would draft such a thing, and the monarch would revise and edit it through approval. That was the better way to lessen the monarch’s heavy burden of state affairs.
But with the coronation just before us, it would be unreasonable to summon an Administrative Officer now to revise it, since this was not an age when documents travelled by electronic mail.
The late King’s funeral was tomorrow, and the coronation was the day after.
“No. If there are shortcomings, I would like to write it myself.”
“Thank you. Reading and writing at night makes my eyes hurt.”
“Th-that is why!”
Even after looking it over again, what was lacking was what she would do as queen and how she would do it—the specific pledges.
In such a case, there would be no problem if she simply wrote down her hopes for the future.
“What would you like to do as a monarch, Your Majesty?”
“What would you like to do, Grand Duke?”
My question and Her Majesty’s question differed only in direction, but their meaning was the same, so silence passed between us for a moment.
She intended to write what I wanted to do. That was it.
“This subject will answer first. I am here to help Her Majesty do what you wish to do.”
“Then what do you think our country should do?”
I had wanted to give her room to think for herself at least once, but she asked immediately.
It was a question like one received as a summer-vacation assignment for a career-experience interview.
“If this subject may speak boldly, first, as the Guardian of the Holy Land, you must seek the reunification of the Church of the Holy Spirit, which has been divided in two.”
“Does that mean we should wage war with the Empire once more......?”
The peoples of the Holy Spirit on the western continent were basically united in their ideals by the Church of the Holy Spirit.
Yet the reason wars on the scale of total national mobilization occurred was that the Holy Emperor, head of the Church of the Holy Spirit, was meant to reside in the Holy Land.
But one hundred and fifty years earlier, the Empire had brought the Holy Emperor and the church forces from the Holy Land, now the Kingdom’s capital, which was besieged by a heathen army, into exile within its own borders and made them its subordinates.
This was called the Holy Land Abandonment Incident, and the Empire lost its founding ideology of protecting the Church of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Land.
In that Holy Land, the mercenary captain, the second son of a noble family, who had joined the heathen army as a mercenary and harmed the peoples of the Holy Spirit, turned on the heathens from behind and preserved the Holy Land. He was the forefather of the current royal house.
“Of course, waging war against the Empire and the Imperial Church of the Holy Spirit, which carry on the legitimate line of the Holy Emperor, is also one method. But if we reclaim the Eastern Holy Land, inheriting that legitimate line will not be a problem.”
To decide supremacy with the Empire was a fine ambition and could reasonably be a task of government.
But unless one was a monarch who ascended the throne during a war, it was not fundamentally something to say.
No people loved war.
“Neither facing the Empire nor recapturing the Eastern Holy Land will be easy, will it?”
“However, unless it concerns diplomatic or military matters, a speech will generally become empty words. Except for the Royal Domain and the territories held by Her Majesty, the nobles govern the internal affairs of the Kingdom’s many fiefs.”
“That is true.”
“Advance as far as the Rin River in the North and block the Empire’s invasions with fewer soldiers and horses than now. Even if it is not the Eastern Holy Land, carve out a road eastward and make the eastern sea the Kingdom’s inland sea, thereby monopolizing its abundant goods.”
“Oh!”
She was writing it down.
Did she truly need to write it all down?
“Then strengthen ties with the Duke of the West and the Kingdom of the Volcanic Islands, take control of this sea as well, and seek access to the Southern Continent and the narrow strait. Circulate the goods of the northern plains and the food of the south and the Volcanic Islands, so that no one goes hungry.”
“Yes! And then?”
She was taking dictation without misspelling a word......
“That is what I am saying, but unless Her Majesty writes down what you wish to do, your speech will not carry your sincerity.”
“Ah, um. I think this is fine.”
“Expanding northern territory and securing sea trade routes are my dreams, not Her Majesty’s. Do you know how to secure sea trade routes?”
One ordinarily asked a young student, ‘What will you be when you grow up? What do you want to do?’ But Her Majesty’s occupation was fixed: monarch.
So I thought she could simply write what she wanted to do as a monarch.
Yet although Her Majesty had gained the throne that everyone wanted, she seemed to have been given an unwanted role and had no vision for governing the country.
Did Her Majesty truly have no vision for the country that she had conceived herself?
If not, she needed time to think about it at least once.
It would be a misfortune for the people if the nation’s leader had no vision for the country.
Her Majesty was young, so she might have none yet. Guiding her in that was my responsibility as well.
“I.”
“You may say ‘I, the sovereign.’”
“It is a little embarrassing.”
“When you spoke in the Privy Council a short while ago, you displayed the bearing of a monarch.”
“I have never thought beyond not bringing shame upon the name of the late King, who was my father. Because I took this place in exchange for the late King, I...... I feel that using the rights this position has is somehow......”
So she had her own reason.
But.
“Ah, over there.”
“Yes!? Huh?”
“There is a mosquito flying.”
“A mosquito? Ah, do mosquitoes not fly anyway?”
That was true.
“I could not let Your Majesty be bitten, so I had no choice but to commit discourtesy.”
“Can you cut even a mosquito, Grand Duke?”
“It is not a difficult thing.”
Her Majesty had been choked up at the mention of her father, but perhaps the mosquito had distracted her. She seemed to have forgotten her gloomy mood for a moment.
Then she asked,
“Grand Duke, if I become strong like you, will I gain confidence? Ah.”
She raised her hand high, but perhaps she was embarrassed by it herself, for it slowly lowered again. It was amusing.
“A monarch stands at the summit of politics, a position where the lives of many people come and go according to politics. Thus, there are those who think, ‘If I remove one person, many others will not have to die.’”
“That is true......”
“If you possess the strength and skill to subdue one or two knights, there is no need to ponder how to avoid falling easily to such lawless people.”
“That is true!”
“After the coronation, this subject will teach Her Majesty how I fight.”
Her Majesty was very pleased.
It would not be easy, though.
[You’re really going to hand me over?]
Only the Frost Sword resigned itself to a chicken-blood bath.