It had come to light that the private correspondence of someone bearing the status of an imperial prince had been forged and altered.
It was an outrageous scandal, but at the same time, if made public, it would place us in an extremely advantageous position by cutting down the enemy’s momentum.
“To think we would actually end up using it…”
“Marquis Strateg, that wasn’t some sort of staged performance on his part, was it?”
With a half-hearted laugh, Revan asked something profoundly unsettling.
Amid the bustle before his deployment, the First Prince had handed me a certain medicinal liquid.
It was a liquid that, even when applied with a brush, dried like water and left no trace.
Yet once held over a flame, the brushstrokes would emerge.
“It was supposed to have been the Second Prince who noticed it, was it not?”
“Maybe that was planted too? …No, probably not.”
Revan denied his own words as soon as he said them.
But I thought the same. That was how much the First Prince cherished His Highnesses, his younger brothers.
When they were caught together in the crisis of an attempted assassination, he had cast aside his usual airy manner and declared he would crush the criminal guild.
As if that aggressiveness alone were not enough, he had apparently gone in person to ensure no one escaped.
It was a side of the prince—who endured in silence and lived as if in seclusion in the palace’s left wing—that I would rather not have known.
“He would not do something that would make them anxious of his own accord. Besides, now that I think about it, the unnatural absence of any letters to His Majesty is strange as well. For now, it is forgery and alteration, but if we investigate, we will likely find concealment and destruction too.”
The culprits so far belonged to the military, but their house stood on the fringes of Duke Lukaios’s faction.
Even if we pressed this point, the current His Majesty would likely be unable to pursue it to the end.
At best, we might be able to uncover the actual perpetrators and their accomplices.
At worst, we might even be handed an entirely unrelated scapegoat.
If it were later made public that the person had been falsely accused, then for an emperor whose political ability was already in doubt, it could become one more arrow loosed when he was brought down.
“It’s almost been a year since he deployed, hasn’t it? I wonder what that prince is thinking.”
Looking out the window, Revan murmured.
Because of the dangerous thoughts I myself was harboring, I looked around the room once.
This was my office, and only Revan was here at the moment, but we were still inside the palace.
“He had himself sent off to the hinterlands, and then his letters were altered. I’ve heard there’s talk that prospects for his return have finally appeared, but over here, we haven’t heard a thing about the First Prince doing anything. If everything gets suppressed and he isn’t even credited for his achievements, then this deployment itself is nothing but a loss, since he’s only being attacked, isn’t it?”
“That, I imagine, was to break through the situation he had been in until now, which had not been made public. Unless it took the form of being cast away like this, he would not even have been allowed to leave.”
At my assessment, Revan gave a wry smile.
“So you do think that prince is doing something after all.”
“Would he send me a device like this if he were not?”
I tossed Ikuto’s report onto the desk.
The curt report sent from the north bore, with just as little courtesy, the word genuine rising in scorched strokes.
I had been made to perform the act of causing this to appear before an audience.
And at the same time, proving that it did not exist on the forged copy exposed the forgery.
Thanks to that, I was called shrewd, cautious, and even criticized as being far too fierce toward those who encroached upon my domain—but it was not as though I did it because I wanted to.
All of it was the prince’s fault… No, I find myself hating my past self for having once done something akin to poking at that First Prince.
“It’s kind of frightening, you know. The fact that I don’t even intend to doubt that prince anymore makes me feel like I’ve been tamed.”
“…Do not say it.”
I know. I know that I have grown accustomed to that prince’s eccentric behavior.
And neither Revan nor I doubted that, by doing things so outrageous they could only be called eccentric, he was moving the situation even in the northern hinterlands.
If anything, I felt exhausted with myself for it.
“The origin of the matter is an issue from more than a hundred years ago, and yet the moment he charges in, he sets up prospects for resolving it. What even is he? There must absolutely have been all sorts of traps laid for him on the way. In other words, he’s hale and hearty enough to pull off things like that, right?”
Revan turned his face from the window and looked at me.
That alone was enough for me to grasp the words he had deliberately left unsaid.
That incident had also caused an awful uproar.
And on top of that, we had been convinced that it was absolutely the First Prince who had sent them in.
“He prevented a rebellion by the Imperial Guard before it happened, captured every last one of them, requested prisoner transports, and sent them to the imperial capital.”
“That was a terrible commotion. I heard the gentlemen and ladies related to them all screamed and fainted one after another.”
Remembering it, I covered my eyes with my hand.
In truth, the person who collapsed before my eyes had done so while Revan was visiting the left wing to check on things.
He was a cousin of the father of one of the Imperial Guards who had been sent back, and he had been in the middle of speaking with me.
Then he received the report that, as punishment for rebellion, his blood relative had been sent all the way to the imperial capital in a prisoner transport wearing nothing but a shirt and trousers—essentially in his underclothes.
“Apparently, since the military had received a request for prisoner transports, the family had already heard the charges. However, it was such an appalling scandal that they attempted to suppress it, and when that proved impossible, they kept their mouths shut.”
“So the people around them had no idea what was happening until they were sent back. No wonder they were shocked enough to faint. It’s practically the same as having mud smeared all over their faces.”
Revan let out a dry laugh, but since that uproar still lingered even now, it was no laughing matter.
It had affected even the fringes of my faction.
There were those connected by marriage to the house that had produced the Imperial Guard, and they had petitioned me to join them in applying pressure so he would be judged alongside the others for rebellion.
Of course, I had no intention of shielding anyone who had rebelled, so I refused, but they insisted on his innocence.
The accusation came in a joint statement with the general whose feud with them was so bad that even we had heard of it—and moreover, it was the general who had captured him.
The Imperial Guard and the military had always been on poor terms.
There was nothing to be gained by sticking my neck into something like that, so of course I had no reason to involve myself.
“…Isn’t it too fast?”
“What is? The resolution of the northern issue is because that prince did something again, is it not?”
“No, I mean—where did that prince realize that his private letters were being forged, or concealed, or whatever? It couldn’t only be happening on the imperial capital’s side, and if that’s the case, then the letters sent north must have been tampered with too, in a way that wouldn’t be noticed, right?”
Indeed, if that were the case, he should first have confirmed with the other party through private correspondence that something was amiss.
If he had done that, the side committing the forgery would have taken more elaborate countermeasures.
However, the ones we had seized had not expected to be exposed and had been captured easily.
In other words, the First Prince must have acted before they realized that he had noticed the forgery.
Thinking back, the whole thing had begun because the report sent to me had been forged, and there was no need to forge the curt reports we had received until now.
In other words, from the north, he had planted information inconvenient to the other side so that it would be forged.
But for that, the First Prince’s side first needed to realize that forgeries were being made.
“The side committing the forgery was outmaneuvered by that prince before they could take any measures. Even if it was only to buy time, the risk was high. In that case, was it to buy time until the military could push through an unreasonable order? And after that, they intended to withdraw before anyone noticed?”
“That order to settle the unrest among the eastern troops, right? If so, how in the world did the First Prince notice the forgery?”
“They said it was the Second Prince who noticed, so perhaps he informed him in a way that could not be recognized as such?”
“No, well… the Second Prince informed the finance officer immediately after the letter arrived from the other side. And by the next regular communication, we had that forged document from Totos, remember?”
It was indeed too fast.
Unless he had noticed and taken action before the Second Prince noticed, the chronology did not make sense.
By the time the Second Prince noticed the anomaly and reported it, Ikuto’s report would already have had to be prepared.
Turning it over in my mind, I thought of one possibility.
“Did that finance officer contact him by some magical method that ignored distance?”
“No, that’s impossible. Apparently he can’t use magic. Besides, I’ve never heard of any magic like that being put into practical use.”
“He is an elf, is he not? When it comes to magic, they are a race with an obsession more akin to faith than humans have. It may exist.”
“Ah, no, no. He only looks elfish. Fundamentally, he’s apparently human.”
Confusing though it was, there were many humans who could not use magic.
Revan and I were from Luciusaria, where magic-users were relatively common, but since people gathered in the imperial capital from all over, those unable to use it were actually more numerous.
“I see. …Well, I doubt this will end here.”
“How do you mean?”
Revan asked back in a jesting tone because he had sensed that I was about to say something ominous.
“This time, Duke Lukaios has not moved much, since he is under the emperor’s eye. Duke Eurasion, however, appears to be moving in some way with an eye toward the future.”
“In other words, the ones who interfered with the First Prince’s return after he succeeded in the north, by issuing that order to transfer fronts, were them?”
“Most likely. It also looks as though Duke Lukaios is deliberately standing before the emperor’s eyes, obstructing him so he does not perceive Duke Eurasion’s movements.”
“Those two usually trade barbs with smiles on their faces, so why is it that when they don’t speak, they work together so perfectly?”
“Perhaps their methods are the same: using their enemies conveniently for their own sake.”
“Ugh. Being glared at by ministers like that—honestly, how have that First Prince’s misdeeds still not been exposed?”
Revan’s words implied the First Prince slipping out of the palace.
I would not have noticed either if I had not been told, and I still had no idea how he had done it.
In that sense, the First Prince, whose actions remained incomprehensible, seemed the more troublesome one.
“I had thought perhaps it would be better for him to live peacefully even in the hinterlands, but…”
“He’ll probably come back sooner than we think.”
Precisely because the order to transfer fronts was so absurd, it was obvious he would rebel against it.
That, in itself, made me worry about what he might do, but personally, I also felt relief.
If I thought that Princess Diora, who kept sending letters out of concern for the First Prince, would have her worries cleared away, then the situation seemed as though it might improve a little.
That was what I thought.
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