Your Majesty, Please Spare Me This Time

Chapter 5

I could still vividly see the marquess’s heartless face when he had shaken away the hand I had stretched out to him, begging him on my knees to help my father. As he’d peered down at me, even as I could do nothing more than cry, he had spat out a curse without a morsel of pity.

“Dumb b*tch.”

I couldn’t help but grind my teeth at the memory, but Tris, who was just as ordinary as I was, couldn’t have known about that betrayal. Still, it felt impossible to love her with all my heart as I had before.

Feeling guilty about the new crack in my friendship, I grabbed her hand.

“What is it?” she asked.

Unlike my own plump hand, Tris’ was slim enough to break. Come to think of it, she had always been dainty, even in childhood, as if she would blow away with the wind.

I looked at her stick-thin wrist and said worriedly, “Never mind. Have you eaten?”

“You’re the guest of honor. How could we eat first?”

Tris chuckled, saying I was being silly. I sat her down next to me and hurriedly picked up the cutlery. I greeted the young ladies with my eyes, and they smiled back, glad to see me. By noting the faces of the young ladies at this table, I could roughly work out which nobles were building a relationship with Father at the moment. If they had brought their family members to my birthday party, that meant that they were trying very hard to establish a connection with my father, or that they had a special friendship with House Bellua.

I only knew a handful of Father’s friends: Marquess Gorten, Count Vincent, and Viscount Hamel. They were so obviously close to Father that even I knew of them, but there must have been a separate group of people Father trusted privately. I had to convince them. I had to convince them to leak positive rumors about Father to the future emperor.

Tris, sitting right next to me, was the eldest daughter of Marquess Gorten, and beside her was Marianne, the younger daughter of Count Vincent. Opposite her was Sasha, an extended family member of House Hamel. This situation was exactly as I remembered—Tris and I subtly serving as the center of the group.

I looked around to jog my memory about the other connections I had forgotten. Most of the faces were familiar. And every one of their houses had ignored the fall of the Bellua family. I smiled coldly, swallowing against the bitter taste in my mouth.

They had needed my father so much that they had condescended to attend the birthday party of a mere twelve-year-old. So why had none of them stood up for the Bellua family when the emperor’s madness had targeted him?

Only when my gaze traveled to the end of the table did I discover a face I didn’t remember. The unfamiliar girl, who had absolutely no relation with the past me nor the future me, was hiding in a corner, all hunched up.

I stared intently at the shy girl in order to catch her eye. She couldn’t bear the weight of my gaze on the crown of her head, and she finally looked up. Her round face, full of freckles, was certainly unfamiliar. Who was she?

“Excuse me, my lady. I haven’t seen you before. What’s your name?”

“Oh, I-I-I... I’m not an honorable lady such as yourself. Please just call me ‘miss.’”

The girl quivered as if she was afraid that I’d punish her or something. When she’d said that she wasn’t a noble, the table had stirred. Marianne Vincent frowned with scorn and pressed her index finger beneath her nose to block it.

“I knew something reeked. Why has a commoner dared to sit at the birthday table of a count’s daughter?”

Arrogant, sharp glares flew in a flurry at the girl. I was very familiar with the noble pride and conceit that the precious girls at this table had been born with. But through my death, I had experienced the bitter betrayal of nobles who had always clamored about justice and morality.

The greatest resistance to Father’s execution had come from the powerless residents of Bellua County. They had come all the way up to Champagne with plows and pickaxes in their hands, raising their voices against the emperor’s harsh measures. And none of them had even been able to fight back before they had lost their lives to the slash of Louis’ swords, he who had also served as the Commander of the Capital Defense, or his underlings.

The emperor had been a beast who had looked down on his own people. Those people had known nothing of what went on with the higher-ups, yet they had flocked over to protest that Father’s execution was unjust. Couldn’t the emperor have considered that Father’s death might really have been unfair?

The cold stares and contempt pouring down on the girl felt to me like that which had scorned the county’s residents as they had mourned Father’s death with me. I hid my trembling fist under the table.

The girl’s eyes diverted, unfocused, as she tried to read my expression. I met her gaze and smiled softly. I was boiling inside, so the smile was a little twisted, however.

“Lady Marianne.”

My eyes still on the trembling girl, I called out to Marianne, who still held her delicate hand over her nose. She turned to look at me, smiling coyly as if she thought I would agree with her.

“Yes, Lady Laliette of House Bellua. Go ahead.”

Her tone was gentle, clearly well-educated. As she answered, she was impressing upon the girl how lofty my status was. But knowing that the education she and I had received was nothing but useless lies and vanity, I couldn’t help but scoff.

“Have you simply worn perfume again instead of bathing?”

Marianne’s face grew dazed at my question. She asked, a bit stupidly, “Excuse me?”

“You know, you always put on a lot of perfume because your sweat reeks. The smell of your sweat mixes with the terrible smell of perfume, and it becomes an unbearable stench...”

“Huh?”

“You know how easily nauseated I am. I can’t handle your stink right now, Lady Marianne.”

“It’s not me you smell but—”

“No, it’s definitely coming from you, Lady Marianne. Oh my, what a stench!”

I even started retching a little and turned my head to the side. Marianne’s face went red, then paled, then flushed again at the unexpected insult. The other young ladies, wary of me, didn’t know how to react. They only sat there, eyes darting back and forth, instead of comforting Marianne.

I was the guest of honor at this party today, and everyone must have been sternly warned by their fathers to leave a good impression on me, a Bellua. The people I had believed to be my friends had always been that sort.

“Laliette! That’s rude!”

“I’m sorry if it was...”

I gagged again, failing to even finish my sentence. Tris chuckled and patted my back. Marianne Vincent scowled at Tris, then jumped up out of her seat. Two girls who had received her fierce glare followed her. Of course, I didn’t stop those girls who had so rudely left the table without even saying goodbye.

“Oh my. Now that’s better.”

When I grinned sweetly, the girls, who hadn’t even figured out what the hell had just happened, smiled back awkwardly.

“Let’s eat. I’m so hungry.”

I quickly cut a piece of meat in front of me and put it in my mouth. The girl, thinking that Marianne Vincent had been kicked out because of her, looked on the verge of tears and was unable to even touch the food. I chewed on a tender piece of beef and swallowed, then gestured to the girl.

“Oh, your name! What was your name?”

“Tori Fassbender, if you please, my lady.”

I frowned at the girl’s extreme politeness.

“You can speak a little less formally.”

The girl grew round-eyed. I left the girl in shock and tried to remember where I had heard her familiar name. There weren’t many commoners who even had surnames.

Fassbender, Fassbender... Hmm...

“Oh!” I exclaimed in recognition.

Tori Fassbender.

The name that I knew her by was Tori Fassbender Vellelum. Unlike now, she’d had the name Vellelum, the loftiest name in the empire, which could not be less associated with the girl currently sitting before me. Despite the opposition of the nobility, she had been the woman the emperor had made an empress and then killed within a day.

Was that really her? I couldn’t believe my eyes. The girl wasn’t just ordinary, she was shabby. Her crude dress of low-quality fabric hung loosely from the girl’s scrawny body, as if she wasn’t being fed very well. Worse, because the dress was ill-fitting and to guard against it slipping down, she had tightly tied around her a cord of cheap satin, clearly different from her dress.

This girl had a timid expression that said, I’m shy. And she was going to become the empress?

I couldn’t believe it, but I also couldn’t dispute it, as I hadn’t even seen the face of the short-lived empress. All I had glimpsed of her had been from afar as she’d sat on a carriage with the emperor in a procession through Champagne for the celebration of their wedding ceremony. Of the empress, I’d only caught some vague facial features and her name.

So this was what she looked like. I observed Tori, who had drawn up her thin, deer-like body tightly and was swallowing a piece of meat without even chewing it. Her hair was similar to the dazzling blond locks of the emperor, but hers was white, brittle, and far less soft, and it was tied back clumsily. She looked even younger than me, a twelve-year-old.

Was she eight, maybe? Nine? The emperor had married her when he had been eighteen, so she must have died at an even younger age than that.

Like a fairy tale, she had gone from a commoner to an empress in an instant, but she had died before she could use the weighty and lofty title of empress. When rumors had spread that she had died at the hands of the emperor after a single day, the public, which had not yet known about the emperor’s madness, had gossiped that she must have committed adultery at the very least.

Due to the central nobles who had despised her, the baseless rumor had turned into fact. They had claimed that she had actually been a spy from Willetan, that she had been a madwoman who had been a past love of Prince Arnulf, and that she’d attempted to assassinate the emperor. Thus, the short-lived empress had become a criminal and history had forgotten her.