Chương 141: 07. Departure Anew 1

"U-um... Your Highness Ignicia." King Valerien III's voice had the structural integrity of a steam boiler with a critical crack running through it.

"Could I trouble you to... wait outside for a moment? There are a few words I must exchange with Lord Rosa. Privately." Ignicia must have sensed the old king's sanity teetering on the edge of total collapse, because she actually glanced his way and—miracle of miracles—refrained from turning the room into a barbecue pit. She simply reached out, patted my shoulder, and gave me a look that practically screamed "You're on your own. Try not to die." Then she turned and walked out. No. Wait.

Does this mean I'm now standing alone in the dead center of the kill zone? The door had barely clicked shut when Valerien III's remaining composure shattered like an overstrained bowstring. He surged across the room and grabbed me by the collar with the desperate energy of a man who had finally reached his absolute limit.

"Rosa! Lord Rosa!" He looked genuinely on the verge of tears as he shook me back and forth with frantic, thoroughly unkingly desperation.

"Have I not treated you well? When the late king entrusted this nation to me, I swore before every ancestor in the royal line that I would see it safely through another hundred years! And what do you do? You take one expedition outside the capital and come back dragging a fire dragon princess straight into my royal city! How am I supposed to explain this to my forebears?!"

"I—it's not that serious, is it...?" My vision was already filling with dancing stars from the violent shaking, and I could barely squeeze the words past my constricted windpipe.

"Didn't Your Majesty hear her just now? The princess said it herself at the end—she'll negotiate through me from now on. That's a massive concession, isn't it? At least she's willing to be reasonable now... probably." The instant that last "probably" left my mouth, Valerien III's frantic shaking stopped dead. He'd clearly remembered Ignicia's parting words: "From now on, I only deal with Cedric." The old king slowly released his death grip on my collar.

He staggered backward, his steps heavy and unsteady, and collapsed into his chair looking as though he'd aged five years in five seconds. He lowered his head and sank into a terrifyingly deep silence. The council chamber plunged into the kind of stillness that has actual weight to it. I stood there, discretely straightening my mangled collar, while genuinely starting to wonder if I'd just given the reigning monarch a fatal stroke.

Just as I was seriously debating whether to check his pulse, Valerien III suddenly raised his head. The face looking back at me was no longer that of a weeping, broken old man. It was the face of a politician who had just finished running the numbers and was satisfied with the answer—and who had also, very deliberately, arranged for the bill to be sent to someone else's address. Every survival instinct I possessed began screaming in unison.

"Ahem. Lord Rosa." Valerien III cleared his throat, straightening his posture and adopting a tone dripping with meticulously reconstructed royal authority.

"I now command you in my capacity as Valerien the Third." Here it comes. I'd known it couldn't possibly be that simple.

"Since you are the one who brought this walking calamity to our doorstep," the old king stared directly into my eyes, enunciating every syllable, "you will take full and absolute responsibility for her. By whatever means necessary, you are to keep the Fire Dragon Princess firmly under control." I froze. Wait, hold on. Something about this royal decree has just taken a hard left turn into very dangerous territory.

Before I could even open my mouth to protest, Gilbert—standing off to the side in his customary pose of absolute composure—delivered a fatal stab in the back. His voice was as flat and detached as a mortician reading a toe tag.

"His Majesty's directive includes, but is not limited to, relations of a physical nature." I nearly choked on my own spit. Gilbert didn't so much as twitch an eyebrow. He looked as though he'd just appended a wildly mundane administrative footnote to a tax document.

"Naturally, should you succeed in attaining a position such as prince-consort to the Dragon Kingdom's royal house, it would be of the utmost benefit to our nation." I stared at him, my brain completely short-circuiting as I tried to figure out which part of that statement I was supposed to be the most horrified by first.

"Have you all conveniently forgotten," I finally managed to sputter, "that I already have a nominal fiancée? And according to Imperial Law—""Imperial law can be amended, expanded, or appended with provisos." The one who smoothly intercepted my excuse was another elderly minister standing nearby. If Gilbert's comment had been a cold scalpel between the ribs, this guy had just picked up a full abacus and smashed it directly into my face.

"But we only have one kingdom." I looked at the minister, then at Gilbert, then slowly around the room. A sudden, chilling realization washed over me. I wasn't standing in a royal council chamber. I was standing in the middle of a livestock market. And I was the livestock. Good lord. These old fossils weren't just trying to throw me to the wolves as a human lightning rod. They had already moved past that stage entirely.

They were in full appraisal mode—butchering me, weighing out the prime cuts, categorizing my potential uses, and probably already drafting the inventory. Valerien III, perhaps realizing that the atmosphere had veered slightly past ruthlessly pragmatic and into nakedly transactional, cleared his throat and made a visible effort to sound like a dignified monarch rather than a livestock merchant.

"In any case, Lord Rosa," he said in a tone that suggested this was a perfectly normal conversation and contained no problems whatsoever, "simply cultivate a harmonious relationship with the princess. Build rapport. For contingency purposes." That sentence still sounded wrong. The more I thought about it, the wronger it got. I opened my mouth, but the refusal died in my throat.

Because here was the most wretched part of this entire nightmare: As crass as their wording was, as shameless as their calculations were, looking at the current situation... this was actually the most brutally realistic option available. Ignicia didn't trust the factions within the Dragon Kingdom—the ones who'd been trading her marriage contract, naval routes, and political alliances like cards in a game she'd never agreed to play.

The capital couldn't afford to let a dragon who had burned Black Dragon Pass wander freely along our borders. Someone had to stand in the crossfire. And that someone, through a combination of circumstances, poor decision-making, and what I was increasingly convinced was a personal vendetta by the universe against me specifically, was apparently me. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

I stood in silence for a long moment, then finally squeezed out the driest line of my life.

"... May I at least request a raise in pay?" Nobody laughed. Even Gilbert merely offered me a look of profound, icy indifference.

"If you live long enough, I will consider it," Valerien III said. At first hearing, that sounded almost like comfort. On closer inspection, it was nothing but a threat. I exhaled slowly.

"So, does Your Majesty intend to invite the princess back in to finish the negotiations?"

"Precisely," Valerien III said, his voice settling back into its working register.

"What happened earlier was damage control—putting out the immediate fire. The question of how Black Dragon Pass is to be formally characterized, the extent of the Yanxia Empire's involvement, and the terms of any future contact between our sides—all of that still needs to be settled." Gilbert nodded once.

"The red lines in particular." His gaze moved to me with the temperature of a man calmly explaining which shelf to put a body on.

"Since you will be the one standing in front of all of this going forward, you had best start memorizing, right now, exactly which words can get a man killed and which ones might keep him alive." I wanted very much to point out that I'd been living that particular reality since the day I left the capital. I didn't. I just nodded and accepted my sentence.

Valerien III drew a deep breath, visibly reassembling the layered architecture of royal composure around himself, and raised one hand toward the attendants outside.

"Please invite Her Royal Highness the Fire Dragon Princess to return." Footsteps echoed from the corridor almost immediately. The next second, the door swung open. When Ignicia stepped back into the council chamber, the air grew palpably hotter. Not because she was projecting anything deliberately—no visible aura, no dramatic entrance. It was subtler than that: there are simply beings whose mere presence is enough to make every human instinct in the room quietly recalibrate.

She swept the chamber with a single glance, then let her gaze settle on me.

"You're still alive."

"Thanks to Your Highness's gracious absence," I said with the measured cheerfulness of a man who had just survived something and would prefer not to discuss the details.

"And I have not, as of yet, been dragged outside and hanged by my own king. All things considered, I'm calling that a win." Ignicia made a sound somewhere between a scoff and a hum. She dropped back onto the backless stool—still clearly an affront to her dignity—and her tail swept behind her in a single slow arc of undisguised impatience. Her opinion of human furniture remained, evidently, unchanged. Valerien III didn't bother with preamble this time.

"Your Highness," he said, his voice level.

"My ministers and I have exchanged our views. There are three matters I would like to resolve before we conclude tonight." Ignicia tilted her chin upward—a minimal gesture, but sufficient.

"First: how the incident at Black Dragon Pass is to be formally characterized. Second: the extent of the Yanxia Empire's involvement. Third: the terms of future contact between our sides—who speaks, and where the lines are drawn." Ignicia looked at him. In the candlelight, her golden slit-pupils caught the flame and held it like molten metal. A beat passed.

"Fine," she said. The word was flat, unceremonious. But coming from her, after everything that had happened tonight, it was practically a diplomatic triumph. Valerien III moved directly to the first matter.

"Black Dragon Pass." Ignicia didn't pretend she hadn't heard.

"As I said. I burned it. No one put me up to it, no one forced my hand." She paused, and something almost dry entered her voice.

"If you need someone to blame in the paperwork—put it on the Sea Dragon clan." Still blunt enough to give a man a headache. Gilbert moved in immediately: "That includes the surrounding infrastructure? The border territories of ours that were affected?"

"Yes."

"Then in formal terms—""Formal terms are a human invention," Ignicia cut him off without ceremony.

"What I burned wasn't your border. It was a rot that had already set in." Gilbert's brow tightened. Valerien III pressed: "A rot?" This time, Ignicia didn't reach for contempt. She actually elaborated—which, for her, qualified as a significant gesture of goodwill.

"Marriage documents. Sea Dragon envoys. Copies of border garrison deployment orders. Naval charts. Cargo flows that had no business moving as smoothly as they were." Her voice was cold and precise.

"You looked at Black Dragon Pass and saw a fortified crossing. I looked at it and saw a knot. Someone was trying to use me as a piece on the board—tying together the sea routes, the border forces, and every powder keg between our two nations into a single bundle. If I hadn't cut it first, by the time your procedures had finished running their course, the deal would have already been done." I stood to one side and felt the corner of my eye twitch. This woman.

Every single time she opened her mouth, she carved a perfectly straight line between undeniably correct and absolutely unhinged, and walked it without breaking stride. Valerien III's voice dropped half a register.

"So your position is that Black Dragon Pass was not an act of war against our kingdom."

"It was not." Faster than before. No hesitation.

"It was a message. To my father, to the Sea Dragon King, and to whatever else had already started reaching through that crossing."

"Including the Yanxia Empire?" I said. She turned to look at me. There was something in that look—brief, but present—that suggested she considered the interjection marginally acceptable.

"Including the Yanxia Empire." The chamber held its silence for a moment. The weight of those words settled into the room and stayed there. The first matter had resolved itself: the fire at Black Dragon Pass was hers, yes—but in her own accounting, it had not been a declaration of war against the Kingdom of Eckhaus. It had been a strike against a transaction that had been quietly assembling itself around her, without her consent, using her as currency. The second matter fell to Gilbert.

He asked it the way a blade enters between ribs—precisely, and without warning.

"The Yanxia Empire. How far in are they?"

"Not far enough to have their names on the marriage contract directly," Ignicia said.

"Far enough that certain sea lanes have become suspiciously clean. Certain cargo moves with suspiciously little friction. Certain parties who should, by nature, be watching each other with knives drawn have started finding each other... agreeable." I turned it over and offered the shape of it back: "They're not standing at the front of the stage. But they've already built the staircase for whoever is."

"Close enough," she said. Valerien III nodded slowly. Something shifted behind his eyes—a deepening, the kind that happens when a suspicion you've been carrying quietly for a long time suddenly acquires evidence.

"Then the red lines," he said.

"On both sides." The most critical question of the evening. Also, finally, the most practical one. Ignicia spoke first.

"First: until I've pulled out the threads inside the Dragon Kingdom—the factions running the real game—you do not use the chaos as cover to push your forces south. If you move first, every faction that's currently busy tearing each other apart will find a common enemy overnight. And that enemy will be you." Direct. Accurate. Geometrically correct. Valerien III didn't agree immediately.

"Second?"

"If you find anyone, anything—people, networks, cargo, names, any piece of that trade chain connected to the Yanxia Empire—I am to be informed." Gilbert, with characteristic warmth: "Intelligence sharing."

"Call it whatever you like," Ignicia said.

"The meaning is the same." Valerien III listened. He was quiet for a moment—the particular quiet of a man running the numbers one final time before committing. Then he set out the kingdom's terms.

"Very well. Our conditions. First: without prior notification, you are not to strike any strategically significant location within our borders again. Whatever you believe is hidden there—you go through the designated channel first." His gaze moved to me. The weight of impending doom settled onto my shoulders with the quiet efficiency of a well-trained butler.

"Second: without authorization, you are not to fly directly over the capital, military fortresses, or garrison cities. Tonight's circumstances will be treated as an exceptional case, given the exceptional nature of the situation. The next time will not be treated the same way." Ignicia's eyes narrowed slightly.

"And if the situation is urgent?"

"Cedric makes that judgment call," Valerien III said. I very nearly asked, out loud, whether His Majesty harbored some form of personal grievance against me specifically. Ignicia, however, did not argue. She studied me for a few seconds—the kind of look that involves actual assessment, not just acknowledgment—and then said, with complete economy:"Acceptable." Two syllables. And with them, the third matter resolved itself as naturally as the first two.

Gilbert looked at me with the expression of a man reading a verdict.

"In that case: Lord Rosa will serve as the primary point of contact for all initial communications between both parties." Valerien III added the final frame around it.

"All decisions pertaining to military movement, border management, and formal public declarations will continue to require royal authorization and proper procedure." I nodded. That was reasonable. Without that constraint, the distance between special envoy and sacrificial offering was uncomfortably short, and I had no desire to find out which one I'd become first. Ignicia, for her part, was looking at me with the expression of someone who has just been handed a moderately inconvenient administrative arrangement.

"So what you're telling me," she said, "is that I deal with you first, and then you go back and deal with this collection of humans who move at the speed of hibernating lizards." I considered, briefly, whether there was a more diplomatic way to phrase this. There wasn't.

"... Your Highness, as much as I'd rather not admit it—yes. That is essentially the situation." The look Gilbert gave me suggested he was already mentally selecting which pile of paperwork I would be buried under, optimizing for maximum suffering. Valerien III, however, had moved past the details. He brought it to a close.

"Then it is settled. From this night forward, Cedric serves as the primary channel of contact between both parties. Any demands, warnings, intelligence, or conditions from Her Royal Highness are to be communicated through Cedric first. The kingdom's responses will likewise go through Cedric. Neither side is to escalate the situation directly, outside of this channel." Ignicia rose from the stool. She didn't object. That, in itself, was probably the single greatest miracle the evening had produced.

She took two steps toward the door, then stopped and looked back at me.

"Cedric."

"Yes, Your Highness?"

"Don't die too quickly." I held that for two full seconds.

"I'll do my best," I said. She made a sound—not quite a scoff, not quite a laugh—and turned away. The door opened. She was gone. And I stood there in the silence she left behind, with the very clear and settled feeling that somewhere in the course of this evening, these old men had picked me up, wrapped me in string, and formally delivered me to a disaster that now had my name on the label.