Chapter 126
The imperial palace was quiet with the coming of summer.
Because the days had grown hot, there were fewer meetings than usual, and many ministers found excuses to stay home. On top of that, even the Emperor had been absent for the first time in years.
That alone made the palace feel unusually tranquil.
In the main palace lobby, Duke Kaelan and Marquis Ragselve were present with their youngest sons.
“Long time no see. Today your sons are with you.”
Because these children had been granted freedom to come and go in the palace by the Emperor, passersby could immediately tell who the two boys were.
“They did come. They brought a change of clothes and the books I asked for,” one added.
“What obedient sons. My boy would go off playing somewhere far away — he wouldn’t even think of his father leaving for work so early like I do,” another grumbled, half envious and half teasing.
Listening to the other ministers’ mixed remarks, the four left the main palace and headed for the rear garden.
As they walked, people they occasionally passed could overhear their conversation.
“No, Arsel says I should study more but I’ve already hit my limit!”
“But Ruska, your foreign language grades at Ruska Academy need more work.”
“Hey! You promised to take my side!”
It was the sort of squabbling only boys could make that made people snicker.
But once the four reached a more secluded spot with no one else around, their tone shifted in an instant.
“They say that the child called Ivi never takes her gloves off in front of others. And when I approached Madame Crevel’s shop, that child said she was there to buy a nanny’s clothes. She kept emphasizing, several times, that the nanny was a very important person…”
A chill passed over Arsel’s face.
“She says she’ll see His Majesty at the seasonal festival. So she’s preparing a very pretty dress,” Arsel continued.
Ruska scoffed at the words.
“She also said that if Arsel wished, she could arrange a meeting with His Majesty. As if she were anything. It’s ridiculous,” Ruska sneered.
At Ruska’s words, Duke Kaelan and Marquis Ragselve’s expressions darkened further.
The more they heard, the clearer it became that this child intended to pretend to be Princess Ivbien. It even seemed the child truly believed she was the princess.
“In recent years no one dared to show up claiming to be the princess, but in the past such things happened frequently,” one murmured.
When Clois had just ascended the throne, impostor princesses were presented before him. Those who didn’t know the royal emblem would stammer when questioned and be hauled away. Those who somehow found out would fashion fake emblems on children’s hands as if they had been branded.
There were shameless people who claimed — with red, unhealed marks on the children’s hands — that they had rescued the princess from the war.
“And Count Aradman saw that whole scene,” someone added.
Even if arrogant, he was not the sort to be fooled by a fake princess at this point. He had seen the heads of those who had made impostors roll within the palace. He would not be easily deceived.
Ragselve, who had been listening quietly, finally spoke.
“We put one of our people on Count Aradman, just like you asked. He’s been meeting other nobles often, just as you said. After the gifted academy incident he hardly went out, but ever since that child arrived his outings increased. He’d always take others and speak secretly. After he returned, many people fell into deep thought.”
“He wouldn’t have said ‘the princess has appeared’ outright. He’d have been circumspect about it,” Kaelan said.
“Either way, if he had solid proof, he’d have been spreading the word in that fashion. Anyway — how did the investigation into Ivi go?”
At that, Duke Kaelan rubbed his face.
“Well… Riden, who went down to Elam City, is having a hard time. When it first became known that Ivi’s guardian was His Majesty, several nobles sent people to bother them. They tried to get the orphanage head to sign papers to give them the child in exchange for a large sum. Apparently the director has gotten very defensive against strangers.”
Because of that, Riden had to obtain information about Ivi from people other than the director.
[As expected, candy is the best for children. Half this month’s salary probably went to their candy allowance.]
Behind the whining line in the letter was the main point.
Among the older children at the orphanage, there were kids who remembered when Ivi had arrived.
“The director said she brought her when she traveled very far. She said it was a long trip and the child vomited and her feet hurt so much…”
“There was a bad friend who took Ivi’s book and shouted that the innkeeper was coming, so Ivi ran and hid under a bed, or ran to the woodshed where they stacked firewood…”
In any case, Ivi had been brought by a director who had come from far away; there were no documents at the time, and they often went back and forth to the Elam city hall to register the child.
“She seems like a good director. That doesn’t help us much though. Still, if we’re going to find the inn Ivi stayed at, it’ll take a lot of time…”
“Um, about that…”
While the duke muttered, Ruska hesitated before joining the conversation.
“I have something I did wrong. Could you forgive me? Well, not just me — Arsel did it too…”
They were in the middle of talking about Ivi, and Ruska suddenly confessed some misdeed.
The duke and marquis looked at each other blankly.
“Does that have anything to do with Ivi?” Kaelan asked. Ruska nodded quickly.
“We narrowed down where Ivi’s inn might be.”
“You two? How?”
“Well, Ivi mentioned the inn a few times. She said the innkeeper sent her into the woods in winter to draw hot water. So…”
Ruska squeezed her eyes shut.
“We used a military map that shows hot springs to guess where it might be!”
“A military map? How did you even — ?” Ragselve’s eyes widened.
Only a very few were allowed to keep those maps at home. They were stored under tight security. She had seen one?
“You can’t just see it. The locks on those places aren’t easy to open…”
Ruska slyly pointed to Arsel.
“I deceived the servants to get access and got in, and Arsel picked the locks.”
“…And Ruska took it out,” Arsel added.
“Hey, so that makes me look like I was worse!” Ruska protested.
Marquis Ragselve sighed at the two boys’ confession about raiding the family archive.
Even if Ruska was his son and that loosened the guards’ vigilance, they had picked those locking mechanisms? He rubbed his face with both hands and asked the boys,
“So, did you get any idea where it might be?”
“Well…!” Excited by the marquis’s leniency, Arsel and Ruska eagerly pulled a piece of paper from their bag.
“They even traced the map?” Ragselve scolded in disbelief.
“Hehe.” A serious piece of evidence for a major offense lay on the table, but other matters were more pressing now.
“We kept asking Ivi all sorts of questions, like about mountains, hills, village names nearby, seeing if anything triggered her memory…”
Arsel and Ruska spread out the map they had copied.
“If what Ivi said is true, the inn should be near one of these four spots. We searched around small hot springs she mentioned.”
“Hmm…” The two fathers didn’t know whether to praise or scold their sons: they’d gone to the trouble of stealing maps and deducing exact locations without being told to.
“All right. We’ll prioritize checking inns in this area. It might take time — she could have left already — but narrowing it from hundreds to four isn’t hard.”
Duke Kaelan looked satisfied. This wouldn’t take too long.
“Good. Let’s trace the inn first… Now, let’s go back to what Arsel found earlier. You said the child said the nanny was coming and that the nanny was very important?”
“Yes.”
“That means she’s someone in a position to make even His Majesty believe her…”
It wouldn’t have been easy to spirit the child away back then. If someone had custody, they must have received the child while Lilian was still alive.
“If it was someone with that kind of standing…” Kaelan and Ragselve thought back to people around Lilian.
So many people had died that dozens of names came and went in their heads. But one name stood out.
The soldiers who came to kill Lilian had not simply gone away afterward. They had feigned retreat, and when a gate was opened to retrieve Lilian’s body, they had struck, dragged out Lilian’s remaining followers and Clois’s people inside the castle, and killed them all.
Who among them might have taken the child from Lilian…?
“Sabina?”
Late at night, a carriage quietly stopped at Count Aradman’s residence.
The servants of the count, accustomed to night visitors, waited silently and received the guest.
A woman who looked old stepped down from the carriage.
Her hair was white, wrinkles deeply cut as if she’d borne many sorrows, and her hands and feet were scarred from hard work. Yet those who knew her knew she had not yet reached forty.
“Hurry. They’re waiting,” Nomah urged the woman who had come with the guest.
The woman murmured with a trembling voice, “Yes… yes… my little, sweet baby. Finally… finally…”
She spoke in a voice trembling with emotion. Her eyes flashed with a kind of madness, then fell into sorrowful longing as if nothing had happened, and tears began to stream down her face.
Nomah led the woman up to the second floor, to Ivbien’s room.
When the door opened, Ivbien — looking as though she had been roused from sleep — sat rubbing her eyes on the sofa.
The woman rushed up and grabbed her, pulling her into an embrace.
“Ahh, Your Highness! My princess!” she cried.
“Ugh… it’s suffocating,” Ivbien complained, pushing the woman away in annoyance.
But the woman didn’t care and held Ivbien tightly, weeping.
“You were safe. Thank goodness. No, of course you would be. You are Lilian’s child — the forest must have protected you,” the woman said.
“The forest…?” Ivbien repeated.
At those words Nomah smiled and looked at Ivbien.
“Remember this well, Ivbien. You are a child protected by the forest.”
“Mm.” Ivbien nodded awkwardly, tense.
That phrase from Nomah was something a princess should memorize.
Meanwhile, Sabina kept mumbling.
“Lilian asked me to protect you. How could I fail? Lilian, can you see? Ivbien is safe. I didn’t lose the princess… I, Sabina, protected the princess.”
She hugged Ivbien as if she were the most precious thing in the world and murmured.
“My princess. I will bring you to your father. I will tell His Majesty of Lilian’s last moments and how precious and lovely our princess is…”
Sabina’s eyes filled with tears as she looked at the child in her arms.
She had found, at last, the empire’s lost only princess — Lilian and Clois’s only child. The child she had once been fleeing with and lost, who had now grown and was finally returning to the place she belonged.
This child — she convinced herself — had to be the one. It had to be. Otherwise, she could never face Lilian again.
