Chapter 29
Inside the silent office. Tarahan received the letter Raid had presented. On the luxurious paper, the sender’s name was written. Mikael La Piechen. He was the Crown Prince of the Piechen Empire.
The Crown Prince was also the same sender as the letter Jerome had previously brought to Tarahan.
Holding the missive, he first recalled the contents of the first letter he had previously ignored.
[Be good to her. It would be a pity if she died.]
Tarahan was dumbfounded by the Crown Prince who worried about the former Saintess. He had naturally destroyed the letter and ignored its contents. This was the result.
“Was it your master’s command?”
“…Yes, it was.”
Raid bowed his head. The Count was the Crown Prince’s man. The letter he had just received was written like this.
[My dear friend is not such a delicate person, so I have no choice but to help.]
“That crazy bastard.”
To think of sending a man to seduce his friend’s wife out of worry that she might die of loneliness. He was truly a kind madman.
This kind of consideration was by no means something that could come from a normal person’s mind.
It would have been more understandable if it had been an act to screw him over. The Crown Prince had genuinely done this out of pity for Ninia.
“If his head was completely gone, he should have poisoned the Empress or the Emperor.”
Tarahan clicked his tongue. He couldn’t understand how a guy like this could act as the Empire’s angel or the royal family’s saint.
The reason that extraordinary mind had gone so kindly mad was probably a family trait. It was easier to just conclude that.
‘Even a dysfunctional family would be better than the Piechen royal family.’
That was a common saying among the central nobles.
The Emperor was crazy about the goddess and the temple. Personally opening the national treasury to offer huge donations was just the beginning.
The Emperor regarded the Holy Emperor’s advice as an absolute command, and when he finally announced the construction of a grand temple on the Empire’s golden land, the nobles whispered that the master of this country was the Holy Emperor, not the Emperor.
And what about the Empress, who had given birth to the Crown Prince from her own womb?
The Empress, in addition to her severe narcissism, held a deep-seated hatred for men with more power than herself, and furthermore, intoxicated by her own disposition, she regarded even her own son, the Crown Prince, with utter horror.
The Empress was extremely wary of her power passing to the Crown Prince and couldn’t stand the Emperor showing any interest in him either.
If she treated her own son like that, there was no way she would leave the Crown Princess and other members of the royal family alone. All the royals, except for the Emperor, had to live holding their breath in the face of the Empress’s tyranny.
“Tell him I’m not a fucking eunuch.”
Finally losing his patience, Tarahan stomped on the letter that had fallen to the ground. Raid silently bowed his head. A dark footprint was left on the luxurious, gold-rimmed stationery.
‘Is this the end?’
Raid was swallowing dryly, watching his expression, when Tarahan, cracking his stiff neck, asked something else.
“Where is that woman who is Marquis Villian’s niece from?”
“Pardon?”
Raid asked back, seeming not to grasp the intention of the question. Tarahan gave a pathetic look at the Count, who had high loyalty but the sense of a dog.
“She’s not a noble. Though she was packaged quite well.”
Miernne was a flawless noble lady. But in her dining etiquette and tone of speech, there were signs of crash-course training.
These were things that even an etiquette teacher might overlook, but they couldn’t deceive the eyes of Tarahan, who had walked the same path.
‘You never know when His Majesty will come for you. You must learn so you can be acknowledged right away then.’
Tarahan’s mother had raised him alone, waiting forever for the Emperor to come.
She lived at the foot of a mountain below a rural village. Her skin was fair for a minority tribe, but her origins were inevitably revealed, so she couldn’t live in the village even with money.
She raised Tarahan by selling the trinkets the Emperor had left behind before he left. But her mind was not sound, and she often spoke nonsense, her eyes shining with a fanatical glint when she obsessed over something.
‘I have brought a teacher to teach you. You must learn well from now on.’
It was a day no different from any other. She brought a man with a fussy-looking face to their hut.
The man was from a fallen noble family, a fugitive who had fled to the countryside to escape his debt-ridden family and creditors.
The man, a model of trash, had perfectly preserved the etiquette of when his family was intact. Tarahan learned noble manners and speech through his slaps and kicks.
‘Thank you for teaching my son.’
Every time Tarahan mimicked a noble young master, the woman would thank the man and give him trinkets. But there were not many trinkets.
After everything she could give the man had run out, the woman gave her own body to the man as payment for the lessons.
Even when the food in the hut had completely run out, Tarahan was educated in dining etiquette with stones or sand placed on a chipped plate.
When the drunken man choked the woman in his first act of violence, Tarahan swung the axe he used for chopping firewood at the man. It was his first murder.
When the Emperor came to the hut, Tarahan was about ten years old. The Emperor, delighted, stabbed and killed the woman who ran towards him, in front of the boy.
The incident that happened in his boyhood was one of the regrets Tarahan held.
“Marquis Villian suddenly introduced her. The Empress allowed her to accompany him all the way to the Danteore territory.”
Raid confessed what had happened at the imperial palace with clueless eyes. The naive Count seemed to have believed without a doubt that Miernne was truly the Marquis’s niece.
‘The crazy bastard did like naive ones.’
Tarahan clicked his tongue, looking at the man who seemed to have a screw loose. Mikael liked obedient and gentle people like the Count before him.
Even when kind and naive people messed things up, unable to overcome their own nature, the Crown Prince would just smile as if it couldn’t be helped.
“Why would they attach a woman to the delegation?”
Even before the uninvited guests from the capital arrived, news from Danteore would have been reaching the Empress’s ears.
The reason she went to the trouble of sending a woman pretending to be a noble as a niece was to seduce Tarahan. She was a well-made doll to that extent, but looking deeper into the Empress’s intentions, it was just laughable.
“I don’t discriminate between nobles and commoners when it comes to womanizing. Her Majesty the Empress doesn’t know me at all.”
It would have been better to send a carriage full of flower-selling women in the time it took to craft one doll so well. Perhaps it was a detail that the noble lady’s mind hadn’t managed to think of.
Still, the empty-headed doll had been helpful. Miernne, who was clearly a commoner, seemed so desperate not to return to her past before becoming a doll that she clung to Tarahan for dear life.
Tarahan pretended not to know and let Miernne’s chatter go in one ear and out the other, making her spill information about the Marquis one by one.
‘The Marquis seemed very interested in the waterway Your Excellency is building.’
The biggest problem for the Danteore territory, which was winter for all but one season, was food supply. Currently, they were receiving food from surrounding regions with the Emperor’s permission, but it could be cut off at any time.
The waterway construction was a means to prepare for that time. The current construction was to create a space for mass cultivation of plants that could live with little light underground, which was warmer than the surface.
‘I should chase them out quickly.’
From the looks of it, there was a high probability they would create problems at the construction site under the pretext of an inspection. It would also be good to cut off the wench who followed him around like a goldfish’s poop.
Cut off, huh. Tarahan’s eyes, which had been thinking about the future schedule, turned to Raid.
“Ah, right.”
He let out an exclamation as if he had forgotten, then drew his sword. The well-honed blade was aimed indifferently at Raid’s right wrist.
Thud. A severed piece rolled on the floor along with a fountain of blood. Raid couldn’t even scream and knelt in the red puddle.
“Since it wasn’t your intention, I’ll leave it at this. Take good care of the severed part and deliver it to your master.”
He was certainly a dog who would obey his master’s command, have his own hand cut off, and then bring it back to his master without a single complaint.
Tarahan thought that perhaps the reason Mikael kept naive and blind people by his side was to appreciate such a sight.
“…Thank you.”
Raid suppressed a scream and expressed his gratitude. It was not a pretty sight. When Tarahan rang a bell, a servant came in.
The servant who saw the hand rolling on the floor and the pool of blood stood there with a face that looked like he was about to faint. Tarahan gestured with his chin to the pale servant.
“Take him out.”
At that, the servant, as if Tarahan would cut his own neck next, quickly supported the Count and fled outside.
All employees in the castle were trained in first aid by a doctor. Although they wouldn’t be able to reattach it without a priest, he wouldn’t die from excessive blood loss.
Tarahan showed mercy and sent the Count out with his neck attached. This should be a sufficient answer to the letter. He wanted his one and only friend to stop taking an interest in his wife.
After other servants had wiped up the blood, the office returned to its usual state. He left the space, which still smelled of blood.
When he arrived at his bedroom, the bed was empty.
