Your Majesty, Please Spare Me This Time

Chapter 3

I had no clue why a normal lady such as myself had been so unpopular in the marriage market back then, and I still didn’t know. However, it didn’t bother me as much as it had in the past. From now on, the focus of my life was survival. I didn’t need to get married. Instead of crying and sniveling about how nobody wanted me, I would put all my effort into protecting the Bellua family.

With a stoic expression that didn’t match my young face, I tied the ribbon I had been holding around the hair Nanny had neatly braided. An affectionate husband? I didn’t need one. Fancy dresses? I’d never owned any, but now I wanted them even less.

I had never been interested in politics, so I had no idea what position Father had held among the nobles and what relationship he’d had with the emperor who had wiped out our family, who was currently still the crown prince. But now, I needed to know. I needed to try my best to win the favor of that crazy emperor, even though we had merely brushed past each other at an imperial ball.

God damn bastard.

Since Nanny would freak out if she heard, I kept my thoughts of the emperor internal, mentally repeating the words I had spat out before my death.

My father hadn’t lived in such a way just for the emperor to frame him for a humiliating crime like treason. I found myself grinding my teeth. I hated and despised the emperor intensely, but I scripted the sweet words I would say to him, the ones he must have wanted so badly to hear from Father. With my flattery, drenched in honey and sugar, I would protect the Bellua family in my innocent, incorruptible father’s stead.

How old was the emperor now?

I tried to recall. He must have been a year or two older than I was. The autumn day he had been proclaimed the crown prince and stood in front of the subjects of the empire had been the occasion of his fifteenth birthday. It was only after he had become the emperor that his rampage had begun. Before he had become the crown prince, he had lived a quiet life.

If he had always been notorious for his cruel nature, as he had been after he had become the emperor, even I, someone who had been wholly uninterested in such things, would’ve heard rumors about it. At the moment, I was twelve, which meant that he was probably not even the crown prince yet.

“Nanny, how old is Prince Rupert?”

I had never put much importance on the existence of the crown prince who had lived in Champagne, the capital. As girls, noblewomen often longed to become fairy tale princesses, their eyes lighting up at the talk of princes, but I had merely half-heartedly studied the genealogy of the imperial family that my tutor recited to me.

Of course, I didn’t feel any loyalty to the imperial family either. I couldn’t defend against accusations that I was disloyal. That being said, though I had been a little uninterested, being the subject of such immense hatred that I was sentenced to death had been unjust and wrong.

I gritted my teeth at the boiling indignation as I waited for Nanny’s answer. She seemed a little taken aback by my question. I opened my mouth to press her, but she asked me a question in return before I could.

“Prince Rupert?”

“Rupert Edgar Laspe Vellelum. The only son of Her Majesty the Empress?”

He probably didn’t have an imperial name yet either, but he would be Laspereich the First. It was a name that would go down in the history of Vellnelni as belonging to a terrible and atrocious emperor. But Nanny only cocked her head this way and that as if she had never heard the name before.

“Are you talking about Princess Rapertte, the only daughter of Her Majesty?”

What was she talking about now?

“Daughter?”

I frowned. Had she said daughter?

“Yes, Princess Rapertte is thirteen this year. I’ve never met her, but everyone says she’s very beautiful.”

“So this princess, Her Highness, is the only child of Her Majesty?”

“Yes. As far as I know.”

Finally, I remembered why I’d never heard of the emperor before he had become the crown prince. Prince Rupert, the man who would later become Laspereich the First, had lived as a princess before he had been proclaimed the crown prince. Empress Ardelle, who’d had very few relatives on her mother’s side, had come up with the scheme to protect her son, who’d had a weak support base.

How could I have forgotten such a dramatic incident, one in which all the people of the empire had been hoodwinked? Prince Arnulf, especially, had keeled over in shock, since he had believed without a doubt that he would be proclaimed the crown prince.

My own stupidity was deplorable. I blamed my flawed memory and dug a knuckle into my little head. Nanny, startled, grabbed my wrist.

“Oh my! Why are you doing that all of a sudden?”

“I hate my mind for forgetting one of only two princesses in the empire.”

“Well, Count Bellua refuses to participate in national politics. Besides, it hasn’t been very long since you started taking lessons from Madam Chrissy. Of course you don’t remember.”

Oh, Madam Chrissy.

I couldn’t help but frown at the unwelcome name. Chrissy Austine was a fastidious tutor who had managed my education along with my kind nanny. Practically a model Vellnelni noblewoman, she had acted as if daintiness, obedience—no, submission—to one’s husband, admiration for the imperial family, and such things were virtues that would be the salvation of the world.

Nanny tapped the wrinkles on my forehead and smiled, saying that she was done dressing me. I reflexively smiled back, got up, and did a twirl.

“Oh, my lady is so adorable.”

“Do I look pretty?”

“Of course. You could rival even Princess Rapertte. She’s supposed to be the most beautiful in the empire.”

Nanny’s voice sounded boastful, even. She had become my nanny after she had lost her young daughter at less than a year old to a plague, so she truly cared for me like her own daughter. Just as a hedgehog would see its child as being soft and cuddly, Nanny saw me as the cutest, most adorable girl in the world.

As a child, I had taken her at her word, but now I knew very well that I wasn’t particularly beautiful, since that must have been one of the reasons I’d never been offered a betrothal.

“Well, that’s a lie.”

“I’m serious. How pretty you are, my lady. Take a look in the mirror.”

I knew that I wasn’t actually pretty, but who wouldn’t like being called such? I smiled bashfully at her compliment, which was nearly an exclamation of awe, and glanced quickly at my reflection in the mirror.

Compared to when I had reached adulthood, I did look much better now. My perfectly chubby cheeks had a peachy flush that added a girly sweetness to my appearance, and my light brown eyes were full of luster in the way only a child’s eyes could be.

I was far from a glamorous beauty, but I was fairly cute, and my adorable dress decorated with bows suited me well. It was a little embarrassing to say so myself, but I resembled a doll. I let out a silly giggle as I ran my fingers down the neat braid.

“You can see it, too, can’t you? That you’re pretty?”

“Um, sure. I look all right.”

As an adult, my short temper had been obvious in my face. I had been stick thin and appeared exacting, a far cry from beauty. Thanks to my frugal father, I had never even powdered my face.

As a child, I had stubbornly worn bows and flowers and other girly accessories, but once I was grown, I had decided that, as a noble, I should be a role model. I’d worn only a frugal, brown dress free of ornamentation after that. I had always had common, inconspicuous brown hair, brown eyes, and ordinary, indistinct facial features without a hint of glamour, so it was only natural that young noblemen hadn’t been interested in me.

And yet extravagance had been at the top of the long list of my crimes, even though nothing could describe me less. The emperor must have cooked that up simply based on a basic description of me, such as being a woman and a noble.

He must have assumed, You’re a woman, so you must like glittery jewels, and you’re a noble, so you must be extravagant.

He must have thought that he didn’t need to show even a little interest in the life I had lived, that he only had to lie. I didn’t need to see it to know for certain. His careless cruelty had crushed in one swing both the name of the Bellua family and the pride I had maintained by keeping my natural greed at bay.

That bastard.

I swallowed the curses that cropped up automatically whenever I thought of his smug face, and exhaled roughly through my nose.

Extravagance? I would show him what extravagance really was.

My eyes sparkled with my ambition—to grow incredibly close to him and extort ridiculous amounts of money from the imperial family. Other than the emperor, the empress, and the boy himself, I was the only one who knew that Princess Rapertte was actually Prince Rupert and that he would soon become the crown prince.

I had considered leaking the information to Prince Arnulf and getting rid of Prince Rupert in advance. But the empress consort was renowned and held influence over the entirety of Vellnelni, not to mention she was the daughter of Duke Arnbach. There was no way she would listen to me, a mere child. Besides, that camp must have considered the possibility that Princess Rapertte was a boy too. The ambitious empress consort wouldn’t have been so careless.

She and Prince Arnulf had lost in the silent war of a palace rife with secret feuds, and the price of their defeat had been death. On the surface, it had been a common enough fire, but having experienced the emperor’s cruelty firsthand, I knew that the empress consort’s death hadn’t been such a simple accident. The emperor had brutally disposed of all Prince Arnulf’s maternal relatives, then sent him to the guillotine, as if to have him follow his mother to death.

With the throne on the line, suspicious eyes had watched Rupert fiercely, but he had lain in wait, never slipping, until he had finally survived to succeed the throne. That was the kind of person he had been— Well, will be. He was hiding behind the humiliating shield of dressing as a girl, but in the end, he would appear with a knife as cold as the vicious winters of the empire.

I simply couldn’t think of a way to eliminate such a ruthless and thorough beast before he became a mad emperor. If he survived in the end, I had to avoid the bloody purge that would result.

How?

By brownnosing the emperor, rather than trusting his nonexistent conscience, and by choosing my words wisely, which was probably the only reason Father had lost favor with him.