Previously
Sid draws his sword to force Iris to uncover her face, but she cleverly traps him using pagan conversion dogma, prompting him to back down and head for the capital with Celios's party. During the journey, Iris stays veiled in a separate carriage while calculating her escape route toward the Asheri family estate.
The King Is Born on the Road
When Peter Wick drew a handkerchief, Iris quickly glanced back at Celios. A gentleman’s handkerchief was meant for a lady.
Celios, however, was far from tears. Her face betrayed only lingering discontent over her choice of the Asheri family, tinged with sheer disgust toward them.
Only when Peter dabbed at his tears did Celios notice, speaking in utter disbelief.
“They say age brings more tears.”
“Yes, and I am merely experiencing it five years ahead of you, Your Highness.”
Celios still wore a thoroughly displeased look, yet that very sensitivity—something she lacked—was what had kept this man at her side and in her favor, so she let it pass.
From the Tehas Knights, Iris had learned to face even death with a parting smile, and so she smiled instead.
Veiled beneath the shawl, it would hardly have been seen anyway, yet it had become a ritual of her own.
* * *
Sid was staring down at his hands.
The sensation of her face against his palms through the fabric would not fade.
Perhaps because of the cloth, the lingering touch felt cold.
If she truly was Celios’s daughter, Iris, the odds were high that she had black hair and blue eyes. Unlike his half-brother, Heyer, she carried the blood of the Repos family.
He had chosen this marriage purely for political union. In his own eyes, it was quite a significant sacrifice.
Yet having seen the woman presumed to be Iris, he felt that this marriage might fortunately not prove entirely arid after all.
The moment they returned to the capital, he would summon a bishop to absolve her pagan sin, and then he could strip away the cloth covering her face without a second thought.
Originally, he had intended to take a day’s detour on the way to the capital to visit the Asheri family, his mother’s kin.
Now, however, the desire to hurry back to the capital and verify that woman’s face far outweighed any wish to pay his respects there.
Unfortunately, doing so would earn him a harsh reprimand upon returning to the royal castle, meaning he could not truly bypass the Asheri estate on his way home.
Situated on the frontier, the Asheri were a house that demanded constant, wary vigilance, for one never knew when they might collude with neighboring Suyeo.
Even when his mother, the queen, had concealed her infidelity and raised Heyer as if he were the king’s own flesh and blood—sparking a tremendous scandal—she could not be cast out on mere suspicion alone, precisely because she hailed from the troublesome Asheri family who had to be managed.
To be frank, Sid had always believed it would have been better had his mother received the punishment she deserved.
For then, he could have eliminated Heyer Asheri as well, a man who never permitted him to lower his guard.
As he tilted his goblet in thought, a commotion arose outside the tent.
A moment later, his valet came rushing inside.
“Y-Your Highness! The pagan lady has vanished!”
“What?”
What kind of nonsense was this?
Sid sprang to his feet and stormed out of the tent.
“We were watching the pagan’s carriage without pause! How could she have vanished?”
One of the guards broke into a cold sweat as he answered.
“Princess Celios said she wished to pray alongside the poor pagan to cleanse her sins, so…”
Sid delivered a vicious kick to the stammering guard. He beat the man where he lay on the ground until his temper cooled, then turned to his subordinates.
“What are you doing standing around? How far could that wench have run on her own out here? Find her at once!”
“Yes, Your Highness!”
The guards Sid had brought scrambled in every direction.
* * *
Trusting her mental map across the unseen grassland, Iris began to walk.
The fierce wind raised a loud rustle through the brown, withered grass that barely clung to the earth by its roots. The sound swallowed her footsteps.
She inhaled the air warmed beneath her veil. It carried the scent of the dry winter steppe.
It was winter. Even though the temperature was far higher than what Iris had known living at the threshold of the northern highlands, it felt strangely cold.
She figured it was because trees scarcely grew here, leaving the wind to blow without restraint.
Throughout the journey here, Iris had rarely felt bored.
How could traversing the boundless earth for a week ever feel tedious after living confined to the north and the cramped walls of a convent?
She found herself wishing, once more, to embark on a distant journey.
To open her eyes wide and truly observe the world, watching the bite of the air soften into mild warmth, and that warmth turn cold again.
To look upon rocks carved by waves and hollowed by winds, bearing witness to a world in endless flow—that was what her ambition yearned for.
Once she had put enough distance behind her that her footsteps would no longer give her away, Iris broke into a run.
The tangled grass tripped her several times, but each time she pushed herself back up and ran on.
“She couldn’t have gotten far! Find her quickly!”
Before long, shouts searching for her rose from behind. They had discovered her absence even sooner than expected.
The baying of hounds reached her ears.
Iris forced her depleted stamina to its very limits. Out of breath, she tore off her shawl and cast it aside; it tumbled and was carried far away by the wind.
She chose not to dwell on whether her destination was near or far. Thinking was its own exertion, after all, and she refused to waste strength on it.
As she ran on, the sound of flowing water finally reached her ears. She had arrived.
Just as expected, Iris ran onto the thin ice of the frozen river.
The ice looked fragile enough to shatter at any second, bringing the search party to a halt as they reached the riverbank.
Arriving a beat behind them, Sid looked at Iris standing on the thin, fractured ice.
“Come back, Lady Iris Repos.”
Sid spoke smoothly, but Iris did not budge an inch.
Sid signaled his men to set off the signal flares they had brought, and their burst lit up the darkness.
In that blinding flare, Iris’s face was revealed to his eyes.
As expected, she was a quintessential beauty of House Repos. The long sweep of her eyes lent her an alluring air, while her lips were thin and strikingly crimson.
It was a beauty he must have seen countless times in portraits hung throughout the royal castle, yet perhaps because of the unfamiliar backdrop, her face struck him as strange.
Then again, no portrait of a Repos woman set against the great plains had ever existed.
Iris wound her wind-whipped hair into a tight roll—the very manner in which nuns concealed their hair beneath a veil.
“It would be best for you to come on your own two feet. Only then will I grant you the bare minimum of courtesy.”
“Do not try to threaten me.”
Iris’s clear voice carried cleanly through the wind.
“A first prince, stooping to such cowardice.”
Sid Repos was a wretched coward who had abandoned the throne and fled.
Iris’s impression of him was crystal clear.
Sid had fled to his mother’s family, the Asheri, whose lands bordered the realm.
Because the Asheri were already in collusion with the enemy nation of Suyeo, his act had been nothing short of treason.
Yet it seemed men were never made to answer for their sense of justice until misfortune actually struck them.
Enraged at being called a coward, Sid’s expression twisted.
“Seize her.”
“The ice is too thin, Your Highness.”
Sid glared at his subordinate as if demanding what that had to do with anything. In the end, a soldier drove a hound onto the ice.
Iris drew the spear she had received from her parents and extended it fully. It was roughly the length of her own height.
Iris held her ground with the spear, keeping the hound from closing in. At the sight, Sid knitted his brows.
What she was wielding was Royal Spearmanship. Among the royals of his generation, Sid had seen only two people capable of that technique: himself and Heyer.
“Royal Spearmanship… Where could she have learned that?”
The commander of the knight order Sid had brought muttered under his breath.
Small wonder he was shocked. Even to Sid, Iris Repos was a woman wrapped in contradiction.
Just then, the ice beneath Iris cracked.
As fissures raced toward where it stood, the hound barked frantically out of sheer survival instinct and scrambled back to the shore.
In that brief moment, Iris collapsed her spear and smashed the ice completely.
Instantly plunging into the freezing water, she was carried downstream beneath the ice.
“Damn it!”
Sid ground his teeth.