The Men of the Kingdom Part II

by Kugane Maruyama

“Hello, my young half sister. You seem to be in good spirits…and I see the daughter of House Alvein is here, so these must be the Blue Roses, if I’m not mistaken. Amazing. I never thought I would meet adamantite adventurers in a place like this.”

  The man who had entered without knocking and started chattering away was the second prince, Zanac Valléon Igana Ryle Vaiself.

  When Lakyus bowed to show proper respect for the royal, he responded with a benevolent wave of his hand. “It seemed like an interesting conversation, so I decided to come along.”

  “You summoned me, Your Royal Highness?”

  “Yes, thank you for coming, Marquis Raeven. Please lift your head,” Renner answered. She was standing now that the prince—further up the succession chain than her—had entered the room.

  When the marquis looked up, a faint smile was painted onto his face.

  It was a sly expression, eerie to anyone who saw it. At the same time, they all somehow agreed that this was the only sort of smile that suited him, so no one ever found it off-putting.

  “Can we have everyone except for us go into the next room?”

  “Very well, brother. Lakyus, Climb, sorry—but please go next door.”

  “Got it.” Lakyus replied concisely and had her companions take their bags. They were probably planning to begin preparations in the next room so as not to waste time.

  After watching the six of them—five Blue Roses plus Climb—bow and disappear into the next room, Renner invited the two men to the table.

  “Have a seat.”

  “Yes, Your Royal Highness.”

  “Got it, little sister.”

  One plopped into his chair, and the other gracefully sat without a sound. Renner poured a cup of tea and set it in front of the marquis.

  “Sorry to trouble you, Princess.”

  “My apologies that it’s gotten tepid.”

  “Hey, hey, hey! None for me?” Zanac scowled at the other two and their cups full of tea.

  “Oh? I thought you hated tea, brother.”

  “Yeah, it’s just hot water with some color to it—of course I despise it, but I’ll feel left out if I’m the only one with no drink.”

  “Then shall I have the maid bring something? Would fruit water be all right?”

  “Tea is fine. No need to go out of our way to leak intelligence, is there?”

  “If we act today, the maids won’t have time to relay information back to their respective houses.”

  “We should still be careful, though, right? Girls tend to blab. Especially when it comes to the palace servants—those women can send reports home at an alarming speed.”

  Renner smiled as she poured a cup of tea and offered it to Zanac.

  “…Hmph. So you’ve already tested the maid info network?”

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “Eh, never mind.” With that the prince took a gulp of tea and stuck his tongue out. “Ugh, it’s bitter.”

  “But Your Highness, what could you have possibly wanted to discuss so early in the morning? Of course, I would make haste when you summon me no matter the hour, but…”

  “Thank you. The situation is urgent, so I’ll be frank. I’d like you to lend me your wisdom.”

  After a light cough to clear her throat, she got right to the point.

  Marquis Raeven’s almond-shaped eyes widened, containing a shade of surprise, but he immediately regained his composure, and the trace of emotion vanished.

  “My wisdom? If it’s a question Your Highness cannot answer…I’m not sure I will be able to.”

  “I believe you have what it takes. No one at court is as skilled as you in these matters.”

  The marquis exchanged glances with the prince.

  Renner was barely involved in any power struggles at all. So what “matters” could she possibly be referring to?

  The marquis smiled in a relaxed way. It was evident that if he forced himself to guess now, his thoughts would lead him in a strange direction. He judged there was no harm in waiting until he had more information.

  “What sort of advice do you need?”

  “I’d like to ask you, since you’re the dominant power in the shadows of the king’s faction—or rather, the one leading the king’s faction from the shadows—if it would be possible for you to mobilize your side’s soldiers.”

  “…Huh?!”

  The marquis looked like a spell had detonated directly in front of him. Anyone there would have been surprised—Raeven’s expression rarely changed so drastically.

  But such a reaction was only to be expected. If any other noble had heard what Renner said, they would have laughed. It was actually true, but the marquis had been keeping it secret.

  Raeven only appeared to be flitting between the two factions, when in reality, he was actually the one contributing the most to the king’s faction, leading it behind the scenes and keeping a lid on the internal conflict that threatened to split the kingdom in two. Without Raeven’s efforts, their nation surely would have already fallen.

  Zanac gasped softly. He had always had a hunch that Renner was a monster in human clothing, possessed of an unnatural intellect, but how had she arrived at the truth with virtually no one serving as her eyes, hands, or feet? She was practically locked up in the palace. Not a soul in the kingdom besides Zanac knew the truth.

  The two of them simultaneously realized she could be bluffing but quickly dismissed that idea. Renner was acting like she was only stating the obvious. They had met enough schemers that she would have to be quite an actress to fool them, but if she wasn’t acting, then what was the foundation for her assertions?

  Renner realized she needed to explain further and, ignoring Raeven’s surprise, continued talking in an easygoing way. “…Well, really I should have asked one of the other two great nobles in the king’s faction, but Blumrush is leaking intelligence to the empire, right? So then…”

  “H-how…?”

  “Wait one moment!” The marquis’s eyes popped open, and he spoke louder than Zanac’s hoarse murmur.

  “Marquis Blumrush…?”

  “You know about him, right? Isn’t that why there’s a limit on the amount of important information he’s allowed to handle?”

  Both of them stared at Renner, speechless.

  Her earlier serene expression hadn’t changed a bit, and she wondered under her breath, “Or maybe I’m wrong?”

  “Y…you…” Raeven was so shocked he forgot to address her properly.

  Everything she said was true.

  It was known only to Raeven and Zanac that one of the six great nobles, one on the king’s faction side, Marquis Blumrush, was betraying the kingdom. The reason they tolerated a traitor in their ranks was their greater interest in not disrupting the balance between the two factions.

  Raeven had frantically concealed the situation from the nobles’ faction and skillfully maneuvered so no sensitive intelligence would leak to the empire. Yes, up until now, he had believed he was pulling it off flawlessly.

  Raeven had told Zanac. So how did the caged little bird get all the way to Renner? Thinking about it gave Zanac goose bumps. “How did you figure all that out…?”

  “If you just listen a little bit, it’s obvious. And the maids talk sometimes.”

  How reliable was maid gossip, though?

  Raeven didn’t believe it was possible.

  But a memory he had of her convinced him what she was saying—that she’d inferred everything from maid talk—was true. She’d once made a jewel necklace out of a pile of trash by selecting only the prettiest pieces. So—

  “Are you a monster?”

  —a fitting assessment of such a woman escaped his lips.

  Although it had surely been loud enough for her to hear, Renner only smiled and didn’t reprimand him for his rudeness. Raeven cast away the presumptions he had held up until this point.

  The woman before him was someone he should treat as an equal. And he was sure his memories were not mistak
en.

  “Understood. We can speak frankly. You don’t mind, right, Prince?”

  Seeing Zanac nod, Raeven straightened up and looked straight at Renner. His attitude resembled Gazef’s in a fighting stance.

  “But before we begin…I’d like to talk to the ‘real’ Princess Renner.”

  “What do you mean ‘real’?” Renner asked innocently, puzzled.

  “I saw a girl a long time ago. Her sophisticated insight was far greater than mine, and the things she said were immeasurably valuable. Of course, it took quite a while for me to realize their value and significance.” The room had fallen silent, and the marquis’s monologue hung in the air. “She was a girl who murmured strange things—or so some people thought—but when I saw her, I felt for a moment like I had seen something dangerous.”

  “Something dangerous?” Renner asked quietly.

  “Yes. I only caught a glimpse, so I assumed it was perhaps a figment of my imagination. But her hollow eyes suggested she didn’t care about the world one bit, that she despised everything.” Raeven shrugged as if to ward off the sudden chill in the room. “But after a while, I saw her again, and she acted like the child she was, so I thought I must have seen wrong… Your Royal Highness…I wanted to ask if I have indeed been cleverly deceived all this time.”

  Their gazes met—the sly battle of two entwined snakes.

  Suddenly, the spark left Renner’s eyes.

  Raeven smiled faintly, feeling as though he had finally spied something he’d once seen long ago. “Ah, I never thought that it was so…”

  Witnessing his innocently smiling little sister turn into a horrifying monster, Zanac broke out in a cold sweat. No, he always had a vague idea—that beneath her beauty she concealed this ugliness. It seemed his only mistake was his guess that she desired authority for herself or that she wanted to destroy the entire kingdom for sticking her in this cage.

  She wasn’t like him; she was something else.

  “Just as I thought, Your Royal Highness, Princess Renner. Those eyes are exactly the ones I saw back then. So you’ve been acting all this time?”

  “No, that’s not it, Marquis Raeven. I wasn’t acting. I was satisfied.”

  “…By your soldier…Climb?”

  “Yes, it’s thanks to my Climb.”

  “Wow. To think that boy was capable of changing Your Highness… I thought he was nothing more than a child. But what is he to you?”

  “Climb?” She stared into the air. How much is he worth to me? She tried to find the words that could express the answer.

  Renner Theiere Chardelon Ryle Vaiself.

  To describe her in a word: golden. People attributed it to her dazzling beauty. But not many knew that she possessed abilities that far outshined her looks.

  Her powers were thought, insight, analysis, innovation, comprehension—every aspect of her mental capacity had developed to an abnormal degree. In short, she was a genius.

  Clearly the gods themselves had lavished her with these gifts—it seemed to be the only possible explanation. Her ideas, apparently composed of flashes of inspiration, were the result of considering countless fragments of information with her shocking perception.

  There probably wasn’t a single other person who could match Renner on the entire continent.

  Or if there was someone who was her equal, they wouldn’t be human. Still, even among races that surpassed humans, beings able to rival her were extremely rare.

  In Nazarick, the only ones near her level were Albedo, the captain of the guardians, capable of overseeing all the minions on every level, and Demiurge, who possessed a wealth of demonic wisdom with a particular gift for strategy, domestic and foreign—essentially any facet of nation building.

  But humans often think of things only from their own point of view. In that sense, maybe it was all regular people could do to label her as an eccentric or an oddball.

  But Renner had one flaw. She didn’t understand why other people couldn’t comprehend what she could. If she had had a peer, maybe she would have been able to realize she was gifted. Then things might have turned out differently.

  But that was not what happened.

  Instead, a little girl expressed thoughts no one else could comprehend, and they found her frightening. Since she was incredibly cute, she was not terribly disliked and still received love to a degree. But the fact that no one could understand her had a massive impact on her psychological development, and slowly, over time, she began to warp.

  Perhaps calling it the isolation of genius would sound nicer.

  The stress of an environment where no one could keep up with her was intense, and for a long time, she couldn’t keep her food down.

  She grew thinner and thinner, and people who knew her back then believed she wouldn’t last long.

  Without her puppy, that probably would have been true. And even if she had overcome her trials, a monstrous being might have come into existence, one who saw the world only in numbers and who enacted horrific sufferings upon the few for the sake of the many.

  It had been a whim. One rainy day she decided to take an escort and go outside for a change of scenery, and she came upon a half-dead puppy.

  The animal gazed at its soon-to-be owner.

  What serious eyes. That was what she thought at the time.

  His eyes naively revered her.

  She was used to the stares of those who found her odd. She was used to the looks of people who found her cute. But she couldn’t fathom what this puppy’s eyes held. To her, these spirit-filled eyes embodied hate, amazement, joy, emotion—and humanity.

  Yes, in those eyes she found a fellow human.

  The puppy the girl picked up grew into a boy and then a man.

  As a pup, as a boy, and as a man, his eyes pierced her with a blindingly innocent gaze.

  But this no longer pained her.

  Because of those eyes, she became able to converse with others somewhat normally as a person, gaining the ability to pass her time with severely inferior creatures.

  And now, thanks to Climb’s simple existence, Renner’s world was complete.

  “Climb…hmm. Yes, if I could be with him…mm-hmm. And if I could keep him chained up so he couldn’t go anywhere, that would be even better.”

  The atmosphere in the room froze over. Perhaps it made sense for Zanac to be shocked, since they were at least partially of the same blood, but even Raeven was astonished.

  He had thought they would listen to the sweet, childish words of the woman said to be the most beautiful in the kingdom. But considering that the real Renner had planned to reveal herself, the talk most likely wouldn’t have been so syrupy, but this was still beyond anything he could have imagined.

  How much simpler things would have been if she were only suffering from love that crossed class boundaries. What she had just said was beyond insane.

  “I—I see. So this is your true nature? When we were kids, you didn’t seem any stranger than a shirt buttoned one spot off, but now I understand how abnormal you really are.”

  “Really, brother? I don’t think I’ve done anything particularly strange,” Renner replied.

  “Why don’t you just keep him, Your Highness?” the marquis asked. “If you… Well, maybe it’s difficult without someone supporting you.”

  “Yes, and it would be difficult to manage while keeping up appearances as a princess… And it’s no good if I force him to look at me. I want to keep him like a dog, wrapped in chains, with those eyes just like they are now.”

  One would be hard-pressed to find people who enjoyed hearing talk about the fetishes of others. Raeven had encountered Renner’s thoughts as a woman, and he wanted to regain some distance.

  “Keep him like a dog…? So you’re not in love with him, then?”

  Renner eyed him as if to say, What in the world are you talking about? “I adore him! I just really adore those eyes. And I love the way he follows me around like a loyal hound.”

  “Sorry.
I don’t get that at all. That’s not love, little sister.”

  “I believe one can argue there is more than one type of love.”

  “…My apologies, but I can’t quite comprehend…”

  “And I’m not asking you to. As long as you know that I love him, how much I adore him, that’s enough.”

  She’s crazy.

  Raeven thought her personality was warped, but he hadn’t realized she was distorted in quite this way.

  Faced with this woman and her abnormal psychological makeup, the two men exchanged glances—what do we do now?

  They had already learned that the princess was in love with a soldier, which had the potential to rock the kingdom, but they felt like they had stumbled upon an even wilder discovery.

  “Well, fetishes are—”

  “It’s not a fetish. It’s the purest love.”

  She interrupted the marquis with a rebuke, and he suppressed the urge to argue. “Well, love…yes. But at present, the idea of you and…Sir…Climb being together seems—”

  “Impossible. And what’s more, if word of it got out, you’d be married off to a noble right away. Barbro is under the influence of the nobles’ faction, so I’m sure he’d choose one of them.”

  “Hmm. It’d probably be one of the first jobs on his list even if he were to inherit the throne right now. I would bet good coin it’s already been decided. There is a man who looks at me like I’m already his.”

  “The one hoping for your hand in return for joining the nobles’ faction.”

  “But Climb would be impossible, anyway… Even if he obtained peerage, he’d be a baron at most. Even if the court made an exception and granted him something higher, I still don’t think he’d be allowed to marry the princess.”

  “I’m well aware of that. With the current state of the kingdom, it would probably be impossible no matter what method we tried.”

  Zanac grinned. This was exactly where he wanted her. “Soooo, how about we make a deal? If I become king, I’ll get you and Climb together.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  “That was fast. Are you sure?”

  “I have no reason to refuse. Of all the gambles I could make, this one has the best odds. I’ve been meaning to move the conversation in this direction ever since you entered my room with Marquis Raeven.”