Perenike Episode 7
The corridor on the northwest side of the Antehe Guild building, leading to the Prince Regent’s nameless room, was as deserted and dark as ever. The afterimage of the white hem of the sanctuary robes Perenike wore fluttered like a brief flash of light.
Aktor stood where he was and let her come closer to him.
Then, just as Perenike was about to face him with only a single step between them, he leisurely turned and began walking again.
At that, his adjutant withdrew far from them as if he had received a silent command. Gritting her teeth, Perenike caught hold of Aktor’s hem.
For a moment, the man’s expressionless face seemed to smile.
Because he knew Deucalion’s sentence was nothing but a falsehood, because it amused him to see her so desperate without knowing that… Perenike could guess a few reasons why Aktor Nikandros might find this enjoyable.
“If it’s Deucalion’s message, I don’t want to hear it from you.”
“Rest assured. These are words my own tongue is babbling.”
“For your Deucalion?”
She glared for a moment at Aktor’s expressionless face, then slowly lowered her head as she removed the veil that had covered it.
It was something the women of the sanctuary rarely did, a custom by which free women of Eudokia ordinarily showed respect to their superiors.
Aktor’s gaze clung heavily to her until the tips of her hands, having lowered the veil, came neatly together below.
Perenike suddenly found her former self laughable. That she had failed to notice such an obvious desire at all.
“What if, instead of Deucalion, Perenike of Basilios becomes Your Grace’s hostage?”
Not as the goddess’s beloved, but as the daughter of a mere noble house. Aktor’s gaze slowly climbed from her hands clasped over her stomach and rested indifferently on Perenike’s face.
“I am Deucalion’s weakness.”
“Even a blind man who cannot see knows that.”
“Then Your Grace must know it even better.”
“But how long will you remain that child’s weakness?”
“……”
“Love is finite.”
“Then within that finite love, take hold of me however you please.”
“However I please… That is a very broad phrase.”
He repeated her words in a dry voice.
“Sibylle, have you ever imagined a bastard who dares treat you however he pleases?”
“He will imagine it.”
“……”
“Then he will feel pain worse than death. As long as you hold my leash, he will never be able to defy you for the rest of his life. He cherishes me to the point of stupidity. To him, before I was ever a woman, I was……”
“The only one like a sibling to him. I know.”
Deucalion’s one and only true brother answered her flatly.
“Did you not agree that Deucalion’s feelings would be finite?”
“His finitude is his lifetime.”
“……”
“It is only because life is finite that love is finite as well.”
“A love that ends only with death, then.”
“I don’t care in what form you possess me. I do not dare hope that we will be as we were before. In truth, the more worthless it is, the better.”
“You want me to dare treat General Basilios’s daughter like a toy?”
He meant that even if she were not the goddess’s beloved, how could the noble daughter of House Basilios be in such a position?
“Then I will abandon that name of Basilios as a woman of the sanctuary. Then I will become a lowly apostate who has forsaken the goddess’s sanctuary, a woman with neither name nor status.”
“……”
“So that Your Highness may use the rest of my life like your toy.”
“And what value would that have to me?”
Aktor spoke as if he were holding and inspecting an utterly useless object. Perenike replied calmly.
“It will bind Deucalion hand and foot, and ruin him with pain.”
“And what value would it have to you?”
“His breath.”
“……”
“I will gain his life.”
Aktor lifted one corner of his mouth as if mocking her. A short breath scattered from his lips.
“You would give yourself up and obtain a life worse than death? Deucalion would be moved to tears if he heard.”
“Because I live only if he is alive.”
“……”
“Is that too high a price to pay with this body of mine?”
No matter what the Deucalion in her memories might say, she was already dead. She had cut her life clean off without looking forward to any sort of next step.
With that, her life had ended. From the moment she swallowed Deucalion’s blood, there had been no next for her.
What she wanted. What she did not want. Treating herself as he treated her.
Would such things matter when she lay rotting in a grave?
Some words already felt like tales far too old, or like absurd prophecies from a future that could never come to pass. Perenike did not feel precious to herself at all.
She had not brought Deucalion back to life simply to play at love with him.
What she wanted—yes, what Perenike had wanted most before she died—was simply for Deucalion to live again.
And the second thing she had wanted was for Aktor Nikandros to die.
“The one paying an excessive price is you, Sibylle.”
“Will Your Grace accept that price?”
Aktor laughed lowly.
“If someone told you he would give ten silver coins for an object of yours worth one, and asked you to sell it, would you not suspect him?”
“He would be one of two things. A swindler, or a desperate man.”
“To be honest, you are far more expensive than that child. Sibylle.”
“I am only the desperate one between the two.”
What she needed at this moment was only a plausible pretext. It did not matter even if she knew Deucalion would not die right now. In the end, it was for him.
Even if not now, Deucalion would die four years later. And even if she saved him from death four years later, another death would come looking for Deucalion.
As long as the man before her remained alive in this world.
“Save him. Aktor.”
If she said all of this was merely the price to save Deucalion’s life, then the justification for her going to the First Prince’s side became more than adequate.
Despite all the exclusive emotions Perenike had shown toward Aktor until now.
‘I think your love is utterly repulsive. Perenike.’
Aktor had once said that to her. As if he found her loathsome. Well, this too was something only a person who loved in such a repulsive way would do.
Shedding pitiful tears all on her own, saying that if only she could save him, she could endure everything else.
Perenike decided to plant a traitor in Aktor’s camp in the same way. Just as Aktor had planted one of his own among Deucalion’s close aides and, at the very end, pulled a single string to make everything collapse. Over a very long time.
With herself.
“Please, I beg Your Grace like this.”
Perenike slowly knelt before him.
“If I truly have the value of ten coins.”
“……”
“Then you take those ten coins, and give me the one-coin object that means nothing to you.”
Aktor looked down at her in silence. He did not try to raise her back up, nor did he even make a show of lowering himself with her before someone from whom he dared not receive such courtesy.
Time passed like that. To her, it was quite a long while. Aktor slowly reached down and wrapped his hand around Perenike’s neck. Then, just like that, he pushed with his thumb and lifted her chin.
His gaze fell onto Perenike’s eyes like water dropping from a cliff.
The man’s features were handsome, but cold as a stone statue in a temple. On a face where not even the smallest shard of emotion remained, only his blue-gray eyes surged like a winter sea.
It was desire.
That disgusting certainty she had felt before dying once again told her Aktor Nikandros’s weakness.
He would never be able to refuse this deal.
The tears that ran down her cheeks seeped into the tips of his fingers supporting her chin. Aktor’s eyes darkened for an instant with thirst.
Misery. Sorrow. Anger. Hatred. Perenike’s beautiful face wandered somewhere among them, distorted.
The tears were false, but the malice was true. The hatred was utterly honest. And so Aktor believed her. That “despite everything,” she had come to him. That Perenike had no choice but to do so.
He believed in the reality of a woman who, because she loved another man as her own life, hated him and submitted to him.
If he only reached out a little and grasped her, he could seize all of her just like that. It was truly an easy thing.
Beyond her false tears, Perenike watched Aktor’s lips move slowly.
“Sibylle. I like precise calculations. Making a profit is the business of merchants, not a king’s son. A ‘toy’ like you is too much for me……”
“……”
“So instead of something like a toy, become my wife. Perenike.”
Perenike’s eyes widened. He told her that they were merely returning to their original places.
And he also judged that she had no talent at all for the trivial matter of pleasing a man, and in fact possessed utterly wretched qualifications for it.
That was the entirety of Aktor Nikandros’s proposal.