Chapter 176

Elise sat across from Barnon when his quiet voice broke the silence.

“By the way,” he began, as though the thought had been idling in him all along, “His Majesty told me he raised the matter of a marriage between you and me.”

“A… ah, right. He did, once,” she admitted.

Her lips curved in an awkward line. To be confronted directly by the very man who had been named in that absurd proposal made her feel strangely self-conscious, as if a faint heat prickled along her ears.

Barnon followed her expression with a small, subdued smile.

“I told His Majesty that I didn’t desire such a union. Not because I don’t cherish you, but because I couldn’t believe that path would ever lead to your happiness. In the end, he accepted that.”

“…Thank you,” Elise murmured.

“You do know, don’t you,” Barnon pressed gently, “that Andrei—His Majesty—wants your happiness more than anything? Even if there’s bitterness between you, try to see him with a generous heart, Elise. He means well.”

“Of course,” she replied, lifting her chin as if to reassure him. “He and I are bound together. He’s as much me as I am him. I know that well enough.”

She spoke with more cheer than she truly felt, determined to ease the worry in Barnon’s eyes.

That day, when she had quarreled with Andrei, she had felt bitterly disappointed. He had dismissed her efforts, all she had struggled for, as though they were a child’s pastime in a flower garden. The memory still pricked like a thorn. By any measure it had been his fault. And yet…

If she inverted their positions, could she truly claim she would have reacted with more grace?

If the sibling she had raised with such fierce devotion had fled one night with a woman from the enemy camp, and if he had returned only months later, cradling an infant in his arms… would she not have shouted that he had gone mad?

Yes, she would have. Anyone would.

“It’s only because we mean so much to one another that things turned out the way they did,” she said at last, her voice softer, more reflective. “Don’t worry. When I return, I’ll apologize to him first. That’s what I should do.”

Barnon did not answer at once. He only looked at her, the silence stretching between them, his eyes shadowed with sorrow. At last he rasped, voice hoarse, “You look well. That’s… a relief.”

The subject had shifted again. In fact, in the mere handful of minutes they had been speaking, this was the third time their words had broken apart and wandered to new ground.

Elise lifted her eyes to him, faintly bewildered, but Barnon seemed to be speaking more to himself than to her.

“I know you’ve been pushing yourself. That’s something you and Andrei share. You burn yourselves down to the wick. When you were ill, he neglected his own body the same way you’re doing now….”

“And back then, it was Andrei who stayed by my side,” Elise said quietly.

“…Yes. That’s true.”

Barnon drew in a long, weary breath.

“You’re right in everything you’ve said, Elise. When the circuits begin to show themselves again, return to the citadel. His Majesty needs someone at his side, someone who knows him, who remembers him. Don’t leave him to be forgotten.”

***

Elise declared that she would return within five days.

The Argan scouts, once they had confirmed her survival with their own eyes, wasted no time in departing the encampment. They meant to gather whatever fragments of their fallen comrades’ remains they could find before going back to the fortress.

There was no chance to press further down the ravine. They were needed at the emperor’s side, and urgently.

Pushing forward through the curtain of black mist, Barnon suddenly halted.

A vague silhouette wavered just a few paces ahead.

It was him. The man who had radiated such palpable killing intent inside the tent while Elise and Barnon had spoken—Rezette Kyrstan.

He was waiting like a predator, woven into the very fibers of the forest, patient as a beast watching prey wander into reach.

“Stay back,” Barnon commanded his men.

He stepped forward, each stride heavy with reluctance, parting the mist with his movement.

“Your Grace,” he said evenly.

Rezette Kyrstan.

Barnon had known from the start that Elise was not unguarded. Why else had he deliberately withheld his own knights from her side? It had been to ensure that the Grand Duke could find her without difficulty.

A branch snapped underfoot. Dry leaves crackled.

The man’s profile emerged from behind a dead tree, his features hard, his presence immovable.

This was their third encounter. Barnon’s gaze sharpened with wary vigilance.

“Have you words for me? You’ve been shadowing me since the camp.”

Rezette spoke without preamble, as though disdaining the waste of time. “At your ten o’clock.”

Barnon’s brows drew together.

“The corpses,” Rezette clarified. “Most have been moved. None survived. And if any did, they are no longer… human.”

“The corpses?”

“Those who fell to the dragonborn. I did not tell Her Highness. You were close to Duke Bellator, were you not? I thought it better to spare her the grief.”

Barnon shut his eyes briefly, struggling to master the dizziness that washed through him. The old duke, who had stood as the roots of the empire, who had protected the young emperor and his sister after their father fell, had collapsed in futility. His line had ended.

Bellator’s heir had perished the very day the capital was sacked. Now among Argan’s great houses, only Barnon’s own Conrad family remained. And who could say if Conrad would not also be reduced to ash?

Elise would need new retainers. New knights. Someone to stand beside her when all others were gone. He and Andrei had debated that very matter endlessly: could she be entrusted to Rezette Kyrstan?

Now the man who had fueled all those anguished deliberations came nearer, shedding the mist from around him.

At this distance the moonlight revealed his face clearly. His eyes glittered like cold lapis, carrying the same unyielding hostility Barnon had seen in that dingy roadside inn when last they crossed paths.

“I would take Her Highness into my care,” Rezette said, his voice cutting, edged with menace. “What do you say?”

Barnon remained silent, his lips pressed into a firm line.

Rezette’s mouth curved faintly, humorless. “I know what Argan has done to her. But I wonder—is there anything more dangerous than leaving her among you? I sent her here reluctantly, and I find she has been treated poorly.”

Barnon kept quiet.

“True, the child she carries is mine. But does not the blood of Argan’s imperial line also run in its veins? Your treatment of royalty disappoints me. Better she come back with me, a hundred times better.”

Still Barnon did not answer.

“Have you nothing to say?” Rezette asked.

There was no room for false pride. Argan had been shattered in battle; excuses were hollow things.

Barnon closed his eyes. Andrei’s voice reverberated in his skull, the last words he had heard before descending here, whispered as his brother had sketched the teleport sigils.

“I can’t tell whether to trust him. I’ve never seen with my own eyes how he treats her. Maybe that’s why I imagine him a monster.”

“…I can’t claim to know him either,” Barnon had replied.

“But you’ve met him. More than once. Do you think… we could entrust our fate to him?”

“Andrei.”

“Do you think he loves her? Enough to protect her?”

There was only one answer. Barnon alone had witnessed every moment in Norella.

“…You’re not wrong,” he said at last, voice low but steady. “Her Highness desires to return to the citadel, yes. But if you choose to take her instead, I will not stand in your way.”

It was the emperor’s will. Today, Andrei had made his decision.

“If you are certain, brother,” he had said, “then until the end, Elise will be safer with the Grand Duke.”

And yet—

Barnon’s chest ached with conflict. At length he forced out the thorn that had pierced him all along.

“Even so, if you take her away, let her and her brother share a final farewell.”

“A farewell?” Rezette’s brows lifted, faintly surprised.

“Yes,” Barnon insisted. “If you vanish with her like this, she will regret it. She will regret it bitterly.”

His throat bobbed as he swallowed hard. He clenched his fists, raised his eyes, and let his resolve burn through the shadows.

“Your Grace, the message you sent before—that counsel for His Majesty to put his affairs in order—was meaningless. He had already resolved it himself.”

“Explain,” Rezette demanded.

“It was His Majesty’s intent from the beginning to pass all his circuits to Her Highness. His will has not wavered.”

The time was drawing near.

“Soon she will be complete. Not a half-formed vessel, but a true magician. The days are few now.”

Elise’s present loss of her circuits was nothing more than the step before ascension, the crouch before the leap.

But the time for her wings to unfurl was not yet. Not until she had safely borne her child and returned to the heart of a restored empire.

To give her that chance, Andrei and Barnon had devised their final gambit.

Here, in the gorge of Riosa, they would pen in the enemy. They themselves would serve as the pyre, blazing once before the end.

When the gorge was consumed, reduced to blackened cinders, Elise would depart with the dragon.

She would return to the capital. She would open the underground tomb sealed for seven centuries.

And when the things entombed there came flooding back into the world, then the age shaped by one dragon and one human would at last be extinguished. Only then would Grandel and Argan awaken to an utterly new era.