Chapter 115: 114

It was said that the Jifiji Temple was completely burned (1)

The relationship between the king and me was obviously bad.

He had not hidden his hatred and contempt of me from our very first meeting, and since then, he has maintained that attitude. He was always eager to berate me, and whenever we met, we continually growled at each other. I could barely count the times on my hand when we had faced each other and not argued.

Even taking our past relationship into account, the current anger of the king was on a level I had never encountered before.

“It’s not sane! You can’t think of doing such things unless you are completely crazy.”

The king had gone as far as treat me like a madman.

I could understand it.

“If you’re not crazy, then you must be an enemy of the kingdom for wanting to go to the empire!”

In the current situation, where I had recently been granted the right to succeed to the throne, me saying that I wanted to go to the empire must surely sound like crazy bullshit to the king.

He roared and spewed out his anger for a long time after that.

In the past, I would have already become angry with the king at this point and shoved my own barbed remarks into the conversation. I couldn’t do so now.

It was because I knew that the king’s anger did not stem from a hatred of me as before; no, his current frustrated yelling was rather because he was anxious about my safety.

And somehow, this tickled my heart. The feeling was awkward and quite uncomfortable.

If things had been as they were in the past, the king would have readily accepted my ploy by saying: “Go to the empire! We don’t need a useless idiot here.”

Instead, the king now seemed exhausted and sapped of his anger as he said in a cracked voice, “You will do it, and you won’t listen to me.”

“We need to know our enemies to prepare for the future,” I said without backing down.

“If all you want is to learn of the empire, you can do that without leaving the kingdom,” the king said, adding that he would allow me to read all the information he has gathered through the years.

“I have to see it with my own eyes.”

“If you truly wish to do that, then you will have to offer up everything that has been given to you, first,” the king said as he stared daggers at me. He stated that I had to give up all the concessions I enjoy as a prince.

That would not be difficult; in the first place, it was mostly empty pleasures in the capital that I had to give up. All my knights were loyal to me, not to the royal family, so the king did not have much that he could take from me.

He also seemed to realize this a second later.

“I will also need to reclaim the Dragon Slayer,” the king said, threatening to take my true body.

“It is a reward I received in return for completing your quest. There exist no valid grounds to take it from me.”

“And what if someone manages to take it from you? There are set precedents for the safekeeping of royal artifacts.”

“You offered it to me, and I received it. It’s already mine,” I retorted, refuting the flimsy premise of past cases where boons that had been granted were retracted. A childish argument broke out and lasted for a while. The king barely managed to hold his anger in check, and then it exploded from him.

“What is the reason for you traveling so far, to the empire!?”

“There are things that I cannot know without seeing them with my own eyes,” I said as I faced the king’s wroth, keeping my answer consistent.

I had not known the kingdom properly either, so I had gone through countless trials and committed many errors for two whole years. Only then was I able to grasp the reality of the kingdom and fill my knowledge gap of four centuries of history to some extent.

On that journey, I had lost my uncle and so many others. I was not willing to make the same mistake twice. And to prevent that, I have to witness the reality of the empire with my own pair of eyes.

I had to understand how the current empire differed from the empire of four-hundred years ago. I had to know to what extent the current emperor and his knights differed from their forebears.

Never again did I want to lose someone close to me due to absurd ignorance and arrogance.

“You are the eldest prince of the kingdom. Wherever you travel, you will encounter those who despise the kingdom, and you will be faced with a bottomless contempt from them,” the king told me. His voice was weaker than before. It seemed that he had finally admitted to himself that he could not break through my stubbornness.

“Is that any different from how I am treated here?” I asked the king. I told him that I had already lived such a life in the kingdom.

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“The nobles of the empire will not hesitate to insult you to your face.”

“If I return the insult, then all will be fine.”

“There may be many who will want to do you harm.”

“If they want to, they can try.”

“I don’t understand this. I can’t understand why you’re going to walk on a path of thorns, why you wish to invite such suffering into your life.”

“To avoid greater suffering.”

The king locked his eyes with mine, and I did not avoid that gaze. He stared in that manner at me for a long time and then sighed.

“You will have to renounce everything that you are entitled to. You will not be heading into the empire as a prince, not as heir to the throne.”

This meant that I was to be deprived of my right of succession to the throne, which has been confirmed in the recent past. I would have to go to the empire as someone who was of the royal family, and nothing more.

After long arguments on the matter, I finally made up my mind.

“I will do so,” I said as I accepted the king’s conditions with some embarrassment.

An unpleasant look came into the king’s eyes. He was not satisfied that my stubbornness had held out to the very end.

“When you turn eighteen, you will have your coming-of-age ceremony.”

The king was silent for a while, then said, “On that day, you will regain all your rights.”

I laughed then, for the king’s words sounded like a plea that I return safely from the empire before I turned eighteen. As he had already deprived me of my right of succession, he needed to lure me back somehow. He had thrown out his bait and hoped that it would be enough for me to bite into.

The atmosphere was awkward, and neither the king nor I were used to such a situation. In this case, it was best to avoid talking altogether. Unfortunately, there were still things that had to be discussed. As I struggled to tolerate the awkwardness, I opened my mouth to speak, but the voice of the palace knight interrupted me.

“Your Majesty! The imperial ambassador has arrived!”

The king’s cold expression now became glacial, his face hardening like a sheet of ice.

“Why is he here now?”

The king could not grasp at a reason as to why the ambassador would visit in the midst of our upsetting conversation.

“Let me see,” I said as I shook my head upon seeing the king’s surliness, “I called him here.”

“What!?”

“Let him enter!” I commanded the palace knight as I ignored the king’s outburst. The door opened, and Montpellier appeared.

There was not a trace of the ordeal he had suffered during the night. A doctor had obviously tended to his bruises, and he had neatly changed into fresh clothes.

“Your Majesty.”

The king glanced at the Marquis of Montpellier, bent over, and asked me about the circumstances of the visit. Instead of answering, I beckoned to the marquis. It was an innocent gesture; the type of gesture one would use to call over a breeding dog.

The startled marquis glanced at the king and then at me.

“What happened to the great thief?” I asked as if speaking to myself. The marquis screwed his shut as he heard my words, knowing that they were directed at him.

He came to stand before me, said, “Well, Your Highness. You have summoned me,” and then bowed to me from the waist. The king’s eyes were round in shock as he stared alternately at Montpellier and me.

“Tell me of all the great schemes the empire has initiated without the kingdom’s knowledge,” I ordered him. The marquis jerked his head up in shock. His face was pale, and his breathing accelerated: A natural response.

The reason the marquis has been cooperating with me up to this point was that I was a prince who had an extremely bad relationship with the king. If, in the future, Montpellier’s relationship with me became known to the empire, he could say that it was all in aid of installing a puppet king onto the throne. In such a case, it was possible for him to justify his actions.

The king’s presence changed everything. To divulge imperial secrets in front of the king was an unpardonable act of treason. It wasn’t a thing he could easily do, even if I held him by the leash. He could lose everything if things went wrong. No, in all likelihood, he would lose everything.

In other words, if he followed my order, it meant that he would be gambling his life, and the odds of his survival would be a slim one out of ten.

Under normal circumstances, the marquis would never have followed my order.

“You must be mistaken,” he said, then hesitated, and finally took out a sheet of paper from inside his voluminous sleeve. It was a document brimming with secrets available only to the highest ranks of the empire.

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“This is not a request,” I stated.

Montpellier’s face was greatly flushed as he stared at the official seals on the document. I could see his innermost thoughts play out in his mind. He regretted it all.

He regretted that he went to the north and on that day surrendered to me, leaking out all his secrets. He was deeply regretting the fact that he had not guarded his mouth when he was faced with certain death.

Perhaps he thought that the moment I left the capital, he would report all the facts to the imperial mainland and so save his life. Rather than sticking with the small country and fighting against the larger one, he must figure that his highest chance of survival was to throw himself before the emperor’s mercy.

However, that would only be possible if he was able to leave the kingdom in one piece.

The swords-elves were monitoring the marquis day and night, and by my order, they would cut him down. I had kidnapped the marquis last night before my rendezvous with Jungbaek, just to show him that I could have him killed any time that I liked. And that I was rather looking forward to the act.

The marquis was no fool. He knew that it was a virtual impossibility for him to escape the capital and survive the ordeal.

And the Marquis of Montpellier that I knew was not a man who would die for his country before betraying it. He was not a political martyr. He was a survivor that would do anything in his power to gain just an extra day of life.

“Speak,” I ordered Montpellier once more.

The marquis closed his eyes tightly. And then, he began to talk about the empire’s secret master plans against the struggling kingdom. His story began at noon, and it continued into the night. He made it clear that I was not the informant who had caused the tragic breaking of the knights four years ago.

“Hahaha haha,” came the king’s bitter laughter as the tale ended. His laugher sounded exactly like mine when I had gone on like a madman the previous night.

I gave the king some time to calm his heart.

“I,” he said after a while, hesitating as he looked at me, “How can I pay for my sins?”

He had believed his eldest son to be in the pocket of the marquis; he had hated and prosecuted him and had finally driven him north.

“How can I correct my mistakes?” the king asked in a subdued voice, asking me what he should do to apologize.

So, I answered him. “Just say that it was a misunderstanding and that you’re sorry.”

That one word would be enough.

“I am sorry. I’m really sorry! I did something that I should never have done to you,” the king apologized.

“I already forgot it all,” came my reply as I accepted his remorse.

It took a long time for the king to regain control over his emotions.

“When did you find out?” he asked me.

“I heard for the first time yesterday.”

“What are you going to say to Gwain and the knights?”

“I will leave things as they are for the time being.”

“Theirs is a resentment and hatred of the innocent. It is right to correct it.”

“I will tell them the truth someday, but now is not the time.”

An indescribable feeling showed itself in the king’s eyes. It was boldness mixed with guilt.

As I looked into those dark eyes, I felt awkward all over again. So, I kicked the little marquis.

“You’ve done a lot of harm so far!” I shouted at him.

“Your Highness, do not kill me for my sins!” he pleaded. He had fallen flat on his face when I had kicked him, and his head had smacked into the floor.

I kicked Montpellier a few more times and then stopped to catch my breath so I could kick him some more, but the king interrupted by asking me, “What are your plans for the future?”

“I will study the dynamics of the empire with my own eyes and bide my time.”

The king pondered this. I felt so overwhelmed by the depths of his eyes that I went back to kicking Montpellier.

“Waaugh!” the marquis screamed as if he would die.

* * *

After I had completed my business with the king, I took the Marquis of Montpellier to the First Palace.

“What is the opinion of me in the empire?”

The marquis was hesitant and couldn’t answer.

“Be honest.”

“Now, they believe Your Highness to be an incompetent prince, a greedy and selfish little boy.”

He had hesitated and then spoken. I laughed at his words. Montpellier continued his report after he had quickly checked my expression.

I was an opportunist who had taken power after the death of my uncle. Or, I was but a puppet prince, my strings being pulled by the northern lords. I was definitely the shame of the Leonbergers, possessing no noble virtues or notable abilities, and I was an avowed enemy of the king.

Even those in the empire believed that my secession to the throne had to be prevented for the sake of a stable political climate in the kingdom.

That, in a nutshell, was the empire’s assessment of me.

Everything was as I had hoped it would be. In order to foster such misconceptions, I had consistently ordered Montpellier not to report my true nature to the empire. The marquis had enacted my wishes brilliantly.

But still… why wasn’t I feeling good about his report?

“I’m a weakling who can’t think for himself? Or am I confused? Am I rather an idiot who will gladly sell out his entire country? No!” I shouted as I kicked the marquis, who had been unaware of my bad mood, all the while spitting out invectives.

The screaming marquis rolled around on the floor, then crawled before me, and, believing my abuse to be unfair, said, “Your Highness told me to be honest.”

“You could have summarized it in a modest manner and without insulting me.”

The marquis almost protested but then shut his mouth.

As I stared at him, I asked, “If I head into the mainland of the empire, predict the reaction of the imperial nobles and the emperor.”

The marquis pretended to think for a while and then said, “Seventy percent of the nobles, including His Imperial Majesty, won’t care much. The remaining thirty percent will be more welcoming to Your Highness.”

I asked him who the thirty percent were.

“Among them are the nobles of the eastern empire. In summary, they control tens of thousands of the best soldiers.”

The marquis shut his mouth then and looked at me. After some time, he spoke again and told me of those of the highest rank who would try to appease me.

“If it were to be His Highness the Third Princeps and His Highness the Fifth Princeps, they would try to treat with Your Highness.”

I understood the importance of Montpellier’s words immediately.

The fact that there were some of the principes who wanted to be on my good side meant that they were struggling for succession to the throne and that their positions were so disadvantaged that they would even approve of a prince from a small country if he were to join their side.

I asked the marquis about the two principes. He furnished me with a relatively detailed answer.

The same situation counted for both principes: The status of their mothers and their small power-bases meant that support for their succession claims was weak. It was said that the fifth princeps’ side had difficulties in rallying support among the nobles due to the clever and virtuous nature of the third princeps.

“People are reluctant to support them because of their high-bloodedness and harsh language.”

These were words I had heard a lot; they were evaluations that I had encountered multiple times from certain quarters.

“You mean they’re crazy.”

Those who spoke about me used exactly the same language.

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“The third princeps is a more attractive prospect than the fifth princeps,” I said, and looked at the marquis who had stopped sulking as he looked at me in amazement, and I added, “because it sounds like I will get along well with him.”

Seeing the face of Montpellier, I smiled.

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