Frustrations of a Self-Proclaimed Villain Lord

Chapter 84: The Grand Duke Uses a Poison (2)

My hand stayed against Adrien’s chest. I could feel his heart beneath my palm, weak, fighting, but beating. The pale light from Vita’s Tears moved through him again, and the black strands shrank, their voices growing smaller, until one of them turned toward me.

It pressed against the violet barrier. For a second I saw something behind it, a dark space, a mouth beneath gold, a line of children holding hands, a figure standing far away wrapped in prayer cloth and red glass.

Then my aura moved. It wasn’t intentional. I didn’t summon anything, didn’t speak. The warmth beneath my hand simply spread, soft gold touching the black strand, and the voices stopped. The dark thing folded into itself, then vanished.

The room fell silent. Not the strained silence of people waiting for something worse. A real silence, the kind that comes after a storm has finally left the roof.

Adrien’s body went limp. The physician lunged forward and pressed shaking fingers to his neck. The Empress stood so still I could hear her breathing. The knight stared at the place where the mark had been.

The dark circle beneath the Crown Prince’s sternum was gone. Only a faint pale scar remained.

The physician’s fingers stayed at Adrien’s throat for several seconds before his shoulders dropped. "He’s alive," he whispered. No one spoke. He checked again, then looked at the Empress. "His pulse is stable."

She moved, not quickly, not dramatically, sitting beside the bed and touching her son’s face with both hands, as though she needed proof that he was there. Adrien didn’t wake, but his breathing stayed steady, deep, normal. The physician began examining him with growing disbelief, his fever broken, the black veins faded completely, the stiffness in his limbs eased, even the old scars near his collarbone, faint traces from years of illness, looking lighter than before.

Abi lowered his hands, and the violet barrier dissolved. He looked at me. I looked at him. He didn’t smile, and that was worse than if he’d laughed himself unconscious.

"What?" I asked.

His eyes flickered toward the place where my hand still rested against Adrien’s chest. "Nothing."

"Don’t insult me."

"I’m not."

"Then explain why you’re looking at me like that."

He stayed silent for a moment, long enough that I thought he might say something serious, something unpleasant, something I didn’t want to hear in front of the Empress, my mother, the physician, the knight, and the entire collection of people whose lives were already becoming too entangled with mine.

Instead he said, "You are very bad at poisoning people."

The physician stared. The knight looked at me. My mother’s mouth twitched. The Empress let out a sound that might have been a laugh, small, broken, but real.

I glared at Abi. "That wasn’t poisoning."

"You poured poison into a dying prince and he’s now healthier."

"That’s a temporary medical irregularity."

"Of course."

"It was an unusual condition."

"Obviously."

I looked at the empty vial in my hand. The light inside it had disappeared, not dimmed, gone. The Tears of Life had been consumed completely, a poison that should have overwhelmed life instead forcing something foreign out of a body that had been fighting to remain its own.

A convenient reaction. That was all. I refused to think about why the warmth in my aura had moved when it did. I refused to think about why the dark thing had folded beneath it. I refused to think about the way Abi had gone silent. It was none of my business. I’d saved the Crown Prince because he was useful, because a dying prince couldn’t become an indebted emperor, because the cult didn’t get to decide who lived in my house. Those were all perfectly logical reasons, and I would accept no further questions.

A knock sounded at the door. William entered after my mother gave him a small nod. "Your Excellency, the western convoy has crossed the outer gate safely. Lord Konstantin has sent word that Mil and the other children are under Sonomi escort. They won’t remain in the Capital."

Good. A breath I hadn’t realized I was holding left me. "Any pursuit?"

"None."

"Any bells?"

"No."

"Good." His gaze moved to the Crown Prince, then to the empty vial in my hand. He’d seen enough strange things in this house to understand that questions could wait. "Young Master Spiro has been informed that Mil is safe," he added. "He asked whether the Crown Prince would wake up."

I looked at Adrien. The sickly gray color that had followed him since the first ball was gone from his face. He looked exhausted, very much in need of sleep, still annoying. But alive.

"Yes," I said. "Tell Spiro that he will."

William bowed and left. The Empress looked at me. "Thank you," she said.

I hated that phrase, not because gratitude was unpleasant, but because it made things complicated. I placed the empty vial on the table. "Don’t thank me yet. You still have an archive network inside your palace. A chapel full of sound anchors. A Lord Keeper who knows too much. A deputy who knows enough to make himself dangerous. And a ritual that hasn’t been fully dismantled."

She nodded. "I know."

"Good."

She looked down at her son again, then whispered, "But he’s alive."

I had no answer to that, so I turned away. A proper villain lord didn’t stand around while mothers looked grateful. That was how people got the wrong impression.

Behind me, Abi spoke softly. "Brother."

"What?"

"The bell is quiet."

I looked toward the window. The Capital beyond the estate walls had fallen into evening, the sky darkening, the city lamps beginning to glow. For the first time since Saint Orison’s bells began, I couldn’t hear a single note. No tower bell. No hidden chime. No three-note tune drifting through stone. Nothing.

The second hymn had stopped. Not ended. Stopped. There was a difference, and I disliked it. It meant someone, somewhere, had noticed the song no longer worked, and people who lost a ritual rarely accepted it gracefully.

How troublesome.

The Crown Prince breathed quietly in the bed behind me. The black mark was gone. The poison was gone. And in the hall outside, my son waited for news while the people responsible for this failure began deciding what to do next.

A very bad decision, most likely. For them.

The Crown Prince woke the next morning. This wasn’t surprising. The palace physician had spent most of the night hovering near his bed with the expression of a man who’d devoted his entire career to medicine only to discover it was apparently a suggestion. He checked Adrien’s pulse eleven times before midnight, then eight more before dawn, and by breakfast he’d stopped pretending this was ordinary recovery and started writing reports with the trembling enthusiasm of a scholar who’d found something that might either make his career or get him quietly removed from it.

I didn’t care which happened first. The physician wasn’t allowed to write anything until I approved it, not because I wished to hide the truth, but because I wished to ensure no one described the Grand Duke of Sonomi pouring a supposed poison down the Crown Prince’s throat and accidentally healing him. The wording would be disastrous. I was already dealing with enough reputation problems. A villain lord had standards.

The morning sun had barely reached the west courtyard when William informed me the Crown Prince was awake. I’d been in the study with Bernard, reading through updated reports from Saint Orison’s. Captain Arthur had secured the chapel. Father Edric and the Cantor remained alive, though neither was currently cooperative. The resonance pipes had been mapped, three surface anchors found beneath the sanctuary, two hidden passageways leading toward the old aqueduct, one collapsed years ago, the other deliberately sealed from the inside.

The red bell remained silent. That detail bothered me more than anything else. A quiet enemy was usually thinking.

"Has he spoken?" I asked William.

"He asked where he was," William said.

"And?"

"I told him he was under House Konstantin’s care."

"That was diplomatic."

"I learned from the best, Your Excellency."

I looked at him. He smiled. Traitor.

"Did he ask for the Empress?"

"Yes."

"She’s with him?"

"Her Majesty has been in the guest suite since before dawn."

"Of course."

"Your father is also there."

I paused. "My father?"

"He was checking the ward lines after returning from the western convoy. His Highness woke while he was present."

That would be interesting. My father possessed a very warm personality, which often misled people into forgetting he’d once ruled Sonomi. He could speak kindly while dismantling a person’s confidence piece by piece. The Crown Prince had probably not been prepared. I almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

"Mother?"

"Lady Konstantin is with Young Master Spiro in the south garden."

A tiny tension beneath my ribs eased. Spiro hadn’t slept well. William had reported that the bells hadn’t reached him directly, but the child had woken twice during the night, hadn’t cried, had simply sat awake with his blankets around his shoulders, staring toward the window as though waiting for something to call him. My mother had found him before dawn, hadn’t asked him questions, had simply sat beside him until he fell asleep again.

I hadn’t been there. That wasn’t ideal. But he hadn’t been alone, and that mattered.

"Tell Bernard to continue organizing the Saint Orison records," I said. "No full names in the copied ledgers, use the cipher. Also have him prepare a list of every temple charity receiving funds from archive approved accounts."

"Yes, Your Excellency."

"And Fate?"