Sixteen: Politics – oh, How Boring

“Insanity in love of course!” I continued with a large grin. “Your majesty, I am just a fool in love. Knowing that the princess was going to be married off to another, I simply couldn’t sit still. And besides, didn’t things work out for the better? If I hadn’t intervened, who knows what would have become of the princess as Ewan’s wife. Whatever punishment you have in mind for me, I’ll accept. Any death you choose for me will still be heroic knowing I saved a beauty.”

Valentin’s expression went a little sour, but the king didn’t react except to slowly sit up straight, resting both arms on the armrests. I imagine it was the equivalent of getting into a battle stance.

“Excuse me, your majesty,” came a new voice. One of the nobles standing closest to the dais stepped forward. He was surprisingly young to be here among all the older nobles of the court, perhaps five years older than me, and for some reason, vaguely familiar. He had long blond hair, tied in a low ponytail that rested over one shoulder, glacial gray eyes sweeping over me with a strange mix of disdain and delight. I frowned, unnerved by him. “Are we going to completely ignore the elephant in the room? He interrupted a royal engagement while pretending to be someone else – is this not the typical act of that match breaker we’ve been hunting for years?”

A corner of the king’s mouth lifted. “Believe me, Armand, I am aware of the similarities. I’ve already sent people out to verify his identity and significant evidence has come back to assure me that he is not Carmen Redlas. In this case, I think we simply have a very sloppy – and audacious – copycat.”

“Pray my lord present this evidence. A person as sly as the match breaker certainly has plenty of ways to fake his identity,” Armand continued stubbornly. Very bold of him, but surprisingly, the king didn’t immediately order his execution or appear to even get mad. Nevertheless, I could see that several of the other nobles were starting to get shiny foreheads, carefully keeping themselves out of the limelight.

“Are you suggesting I’m incapable of running a thorough investigation?”

Ooh, get him!

“Of course not, my lord,” Armand said, looking cool and confident under the king’s stare. “But I’ve studied the match breaker since he emerged; I know all of his tricks. As the one most familiar with his schemes, I can assure the accuracy of your findings.”

…Creepy. Way too creepy! What do you mean, you’ve studied me? I never knew I had this kind of hardcore fan.

I know I’m pretty amazing, but there’s no need to go this far??

The king sighed and waved a hand. “If you must. I’ll discuss it with you later. Crown prince, as the one who captured him, do you have anything to say about his identity?”

Called out, Valentin snapped to attention like a soldier. Not like a son.

Also, who addresses their own son as ‘crown prince’? Even my father wasn’t that unfamiliar with me, and he once strung me up in a net in a tree and told me if I couldn’t find my way out, he’d let me die up there.

Eh, perhaps there wasn’t much point in comparing.

“The match breaker is too smart to willingly get involved with the royal family. You’re correct, father. Mr. Lyndsen confessed to me that he was only borrowing the match breaker’s ideas to get to Beatrice.”

I ignored the implication that I was stupid – because I had, indeed, willingly gotten involved with the royal family. I couldn’t be too mad, in hindsight, it was incredibly stupid.

I was just too blinded by hope, too greedy to get to my goal.

But no matter. My time would come.

“Regardless of who he really is,” another noble spoke up, this one gone entirely gray and dressed more modestly. He thoughtfully stroked his beard. “He has still committed crimes typically punished by death, so I’m wondering why he is still standing here, alive and well?”

Okay, well, fuck you too, grandpa.

“Considering that the engagement I broke was between the nation’s beloved princess and a Count who’s already sowed his seed in gods know how many women, I think I’m still standing because what I did was wrong – but had the princess been married to the Count, I think we all know how much worse that would be, not just for the princess, but for the country. Or is Pansolum the kind of country that blindly allows its women to be so heinously mistreated? No wonder Juno is so avidly attacking us.”

A freezing silence fell over the room. Even the wall sconces seemed to tremble, casting flickering light over every stony face, including the king, whose stoic expression finally twitched.

Juno was a matriarchal country, very powerful and quite vicious when it wanted to be. Pansolum wasn’t the worst country for women to live in, but it certainly wasn’t the best, either. Women in Pansolum could hold jobs if they wished, could make decisions in government if their station was high enough, but most did not and could not without a husband supporting them. Juno, predictably, did not like this very much, and had often quarreled with Pansolum over it in the past. They particularly took issue with the engagement laws, considering them needlessly strict and harmful to women who typically had even less of a say in who they’d be marrying than their male counterparts. It was only in recent years that the dispute blossomed into a full war when Pansolum started a small skirmish at the border it shared with Juno, attempting to expand its territory.

Now given a reason to attack Pansolum, Juno took it with relish, and for all Valentin said the end of the war was in sight, I refused to believe it would end with a few diplomatic visits.

The only reason Pansolum was trying so hard to be diplomatic about it, I assumed, was because Juno was currently kicking their ass.

If Juno heard that the king of Pansolum had essentially thrown away one of his own daughters, it would only add fuel to the fire. Juno would absolutely take that incident as a reason to continue fighting even harder – to liberate the women of Pansolum.

With the Count’s misdeeds out in the open, the king really had no choice but to backtrack and say that he’d had no idea what kind of person the Count was before the betrothal. That’s the only way he could prevent the people from grumbling about the blatant mistreatment, and the only way to prevent Juno from using it as a catalyst to get the people of Pansolum to revolt. There were already a significant number of people within Pansolum who secretly wished Juno would forcefully take over.

The worst thing a nation could deal with while at war was to also have to deal with a civil war at the same time.

To make matters worse, having to tell the nation that he hadn’t known about Ewan’s misdeeds opened up another wave of criticism – because how in the hell could the king not know? Was he lying, or just incompetent? That’s what the people would naturally think. But the king had no choice but to accept this criticism, because the alternative – that he knew about Ewan and didn’t care – was much worse. Better to be seen as a bit incompetent rather than cruel.

And as much as everyone in this room probably hated it, the fact that I had swooped in to save the princess from this engagement was public knowledge, and killing me while allowing the Count to get off with an honestly very light sentence would have the same catalytic effect among the people. Actually, what I’d done was quite beneficial for the king, because the people were naturally going to chatter about how romantic it was that I’d swooped in at the last second, which would take some of their attention off of Ewan and the king’s lack of regard.

Given how good the Count was at keeping his shadiness under lock and key, I’m guessing the king was counting on him keeping the princess buckled down once they married. He must have desperately wanted that connection to Albbari, enough to risk someone eventually leaking how the princess was essentially shoved into a harem, disgraced and ignored.

Then again, it made complete sense, because if Pansolum gained an alliance with Albbari, they could attack Juno together, and then the consequences of someone finding out what happened to the princess would be much less severe. The people wouldn’t like it very much, but he could find a way to distract them or smooth things over, I’m sure.

But the king had just lost the only connection to Albbari he had, and Juno was still salivating for his blood. Juno was an even match for Pansolum’s military might, especially with the pirates of Dorr weakening Pansolum’s naval base. It was too risky. He had to be very careful in how he handled this situation.

The fact that I was alive right now wasn’t just because he wanted my skills. I had also become a very precarious piece on his chessboard.

I thought all this through, and now enlightened, I smiled wider, confident that my life was currently quite safe.

When only silence answered me, I continued. “In fact, if it weren’t for the crown prince’s tireless investigation of both myself and Ewan, it would seem as though the royal family treats the nation’s princesses as little more than currency, quite shameful indeed. The prince has really saved the day this time around. Don’t you agree, my king?”