Chapter 117
‘Let’s make a wager.’
Though she would have forgotten it immediately afterward, now it came back with striking clarity—that day, that moment, that man.
He had said he would prevent her death.
That should have been all.
Lost in thought, Riina didn’t realize she was thinking of Einar again until she shook her head, awakening from her reverie.
“I should start with what I can do.”
Slowly opening her eyes, Riina turned her gaze toward one corner of the imperial palace, where the youngest prince’s quarters were located.
The afternoon was passing, as the sun traced its curve westward, bathing her even redder hair in its light.
Around the time Riina and Jane were enjoying their not-so-sweet and rather fierce tea time.
Einar, leaving the imperial palace, was having a truly fierce conversation with Smith, whom he had encountered by chance.
“What did His Majesty say?”
While Smith asked with a piercing gaze that suggested he would tear Einar apart right then and there, Einar looked down at him with glass-like eyes and answered:
“Didn’t you learn to speak according to the five Ws and one H when asking questions?”
“I already know you met with His Majesty privately! You coward! After all that talk about foreign merchants plotting something, did you go running your mouth to His Majesty without any proper evidence?”
Smith looked as if he might grab Einar by the collar but didn’t dare reach out his hand.
He had no desire to experience again the pain of having his wrist twisted until it felt like his tendons would snap.
Moreover, this man was the type who could casually break his wrist tendons and walk away without a care.
‘He is a once-in-a-century genius.’
Like a ghost, the words of the scholars who had taught the princes resurfaced in his mind, though he had tried not to recall them.
Smith ignored the sticky mix of emotions—humiliation and shame, jealousy and resignation—that he hadn’t felt in a very long time.
However, Einar wasn’t one to miss the instinctive twitch of Smith’s fingertips.
While he had no interest in Smith and thus remained unaware of the inferiority complex the other felt toward him, he clearly recognized that Smith feared him at this moment.
He smiled and approached Smith without hesitation.
As the distance between them suddenly shortened, Smith unconsciously tried to step back, but then, with a face turning bright red, he planted his feet firmly.
“That seems better.”
“What?”
Einar tapped his ear with a wide smile.
“You were shouting so much that I deliberately came closer. I won’t refuse if you want to thank me.”
“Einar!”
Smith yelled at him, who didn’t even try to hide his mocking tone, but Einar didn’t so much as blink.
“And you’ve got it wrong.”
“What, what are you saying.”
Though Smith felt foolish at the arbitrarily shifting conversation, he couldn’t help but keep asking.
“About the suspicious movements of the foreign merchant group. You said there was no evidence.”
“What? Don’t tell me you actually found something!”
Since the last gathering of the princes, Smith hadn’t slept properly for a single day due to his anxiety.
The test set by the Emperor—or rather, not explicitly called a test, but a kind of examination for the position of Crown Prince—would soon come to an end.
But he hadn’t accomplished anything with visible results, nothing he could confidently present to the Emperor.
If anything, requests for trade cooperation had decreased slightly compared to previous years.
Excessively high fees were cited as the cause, but he couldn’t magically resolve that issue.
His only consolation was that not only he but also the First Prince had failed to achieve any significant results.
It’s not even funny. To think he had to find reassurance by comparing himself to the likes of the First Prince.
Swallowing his curses, Smith instinctively thought of Riina when Einar, now expressionless, entered his field of vision.
To think of Riina while looking at that guy.
Though he had already decided she was a severed connection that needed to be removed, he felt regretful.
If that woman had still been clinging to him, this test would have easily ended in his victory.
That commoner shadow of Riina’s didn’t seem to have that much value for use yet.
Looking at Einar made his blood boil, but he couldn’t look away.
Though he didn’t know exactly what it was, his intuition kept warning him that the moment he turned his gaze away, something terribly unfavorable would happen.
Smith’s lips twitched as he met Einar’s ash-gray eyes, like a hazy fog with unreadable thoughts.
“What did you find out?”
Though he knew he wouldn’t get a proper answer, he had to ask.
Even his attempts to discover and resolve whatever the “suspicious foreign group” that Einar had casually mentioned might be plotting had been unsuccessful.
Or did such a suspicious group even exist in the first place?
‘I apologize. We’ve checked through all channels, but…’
His trembling aide didn’t seem to be lying.
He himself had gone out wearing clothes that didn’t suit him, wandering unfamiliar streets to gather information personally, but couldn’t obtain any information at all.
Naturally, he had come to one hypothesis.
If such things actually existed and he could resolve the foreign threat, wouldn’t that be the best way to catch the Emperor’s eye?
So in the midst of the ongoing test for the Crown Prince position, Einar had casually leaked a perfectly timely, perfectly good opportunity to his competitors.
“So you really did lie about suspicious groups or whatever…”
“Just because you couldn’t find it doesn’t mean you should turn facts into lies.”
Smith clamped his mouth shut at Einar’s caustic words, and Einar added with a smirk:
“You investigated too, right? I heard the reports.”
Of course he had investigated and heard the reports.
“How did you know that?”
“You’re not the only one with an aide.”
“Did your aide start this? Did you just believe your aide and then—”
“As if. My aide is an excessively diligent fellow who only travels between the palace and my residence.”
But surely…
‘There are those who have formed a kind of organization, complaining that the fees the empire collects are too high, but they’re neither systematic nor threatening enough to concern Your Highness.’
Smith had roared at his aide, who was sweating and watching his reaction.
‘Just tell me the conclusion!’
‘It’s just a gathering of some merchants who like to drink, meeting every night to enjoy alcohol.’
Wasn’t that what he had said?
What Smith had seen with his own eyes and heard with his own ears when he went out personally wasn’t much different.
If that was the case, where on earth did that guy… No, more importantly, if all of this was true, he needed to discover what information that guy was hiding.
There was no point in continuing this conversation; it would only waste time.
Smith half-turned his body and gritted his teeth.
“Whatever you’re hiding, I won’t stand by and do nothing.”
Yes. Whatever that guy had kept so carefully hidden to gain time with His Majesty, he would definitely find out and…
“An epidemic is suspected.”
Before Smith’s burning, greedy resolution could be completed, Einar casually revealed what he had been so determined to discover.
Smith momentarily failed to follow Einar’s meaning and just blinked, and Einar generously added more of the facts he had uncovered.
“The suspicious foreign groups had been employing imperial citizens for various tasks. In the areas where people who gathered and processed mushrooms for them live, patients with identical symptoms have been appearing. Though it’s not certain yet, if it’s an epidemic, it would be a national disaster, so His Majesty…”
“Wait! Wait, wait!”
Smith waved his hands, feeling slightly dizzy at Einar’s unimpeded flow of words.
He glared at Einar while pressing his temples, but Einar continued to show not just indifference but now undisguised boredom.
“You really…”
At that impossibly casual demeanor, Smith grimaced in disbelief, and once again, Einar kindly provided an answer.
“Since you said I was hiding something, I was kindly telling you what I know. Though I never intended to hide it in the first place. You asked, so I’m telling you.”
It was an absurd response, but Einar remained nonchalant, and in inverse proportion, the fire that had been burning in Smith’s chest since earlier grew larger, seemingly ready to explode at any moment.
Yes. That’s the kind of person he was.
The type who would casually drop the fact that suspicious foreign groups were plotting something within the empire during a gathering of princes.
The Second Prince with eyes like cold, extinguished ashes, who seemed to find everything trivial and uninteresting.
And yet…
‘Your Highness, the Second Prince has already…’
‘Your Highness, the Second Prince has already…’
‘The Second Prince, much faster…’
‘The Second Prince…’
That insufferable genius. A talent so excellent it was maddening, who held every unprecedented record in imperial history.
Then one day, as if suddenly tired of everything, his temperament began to swing so extremely between heaven and earth that the constant refrain of “His Highness the Second Prince” disappeared.
After that, Smith never asked how Einar was doing or what he was up to these days, and with time, he forgot about his existence entirely.
As most people had.
Thus, the Second Prince had been the forgotten prince to everyone until just recently.
Following Riina’s sudden declaration breaking off their engagement, Einar had, like a tasteless joke, become engaged to Riina Bolshevik, who had left Smith.
As his thoughts reached this point, Smith couldn’t help but run his mouth, driven by the deep-rooted sense of inferiority he had believed gone, the anxiety that things weren’t going well, and jealousy toward Einar, who had so casually snatched something so important to him with an expressionless face.
