Chapter 29
The crime was clear-cut, the testimonies overflowed, and above all, the Duke himself was among the witnesses. So of course the execution was carried out.
However, as is always the case everywhere, people had a variety of opinions, and as soon as the announcement went up that the head maidservant would be executed the next day, the chatter began.
“No, but still, how could they go so far as execution? She raised His Highness from childhood, didn’t she?”
“Oh, come to your senses. When she was so rude to the Vice Consort just now, didn’t you yourself say, ‘That’s not right’? If they don’t execute her, the Ostein ducal house or the imperial family will react immediately—what will you do then?”
A few banquet attendees who knew full well what it meant for the Duchess to be forced to eat poisoned food and wander on the brink of death had honestly testified to what they had seen. And they thought the Duke’s judgment was correct.
“Honestly, I thought the head maidservant was drunk. No matter that she’s a baroness’s wife herself, the Windgood family was never that prominent to begin with, was it? She acted up here, of all places—how much more so toward the daughter of Ostein Duke?”
That was the biggest problem. Before Kaella nearly died, refusing the Ferenco with Tourberry in it had just been the finicky southern duke’s daughter being annoyingly picky for no good reason. But now, swept up in the atmosphere of coercion and wandering on the brink of death as the Duchess—that was an entirely different story.
Ostein wouldn’t stay quiet, and neither would the imperial family. In Lüsenford, where winters were so long and harsh that support from Kline was desperately needed, this matter had to be handled even more decisively.
“But still, she didn’t just nurse him—she was practically his wet nurse, raising the Duke from infancy.”
“The head maidservant as a wet nurse? She wasn’t even personally appointed by Her Imperial Majesty, yet she went around playing mother-in-law on her own whim. She wasn’t in her right mind.”
“But considering her merits all this time, shouldn’t they show some leniency? She probably didn’t know it would go that far.”
To the people of Lüsenford, it might have been that the head maidservant “didn’t know” and acted out of ignorance—and above all, the contributions she had made since the Duke first came to Lüsenford were now rendered worthless in front of the Ostein duke’s daughter, who had just arrived.
To the people of Lüsenford, who always fought, endured, and sacrificed yet never received recognition from Kline, this was an immensely bitter pill to swallow.
And Kaella, the outsider who had never been fully accepted here until the end, knew that all too well.
“The investigation is complete, so the execution is scheduled for tomorrow morning.”
When Pheon, who had carefully entered and checked on her condition, said this, she was utterly stunned.
Execution? Execution? Of whom? The head maidservant?
“I’m truly sorry to subject you to such grim talk so soon after waking, but this is the natural course of action.”
Pheon spoke carefully but firmly. Kaella, who could barely sit up with pillows piled high behind her, stared at him in disbelief.
Was this the same man she knew? The doubts kept piling up. How could he so casually speak of execution?
“The head maidservant?”
Pheon nodded.
“You’re executing her? No, you’re executing her?”
He felt a twinge of regret as he watched her slip into informal speech unthinkingly before correcting herself to polite language.
“We have to start with the head maidservant.”
“Why?”
She blurted out the question in her shock. Just as she had predicted—or rather, as she had already experienced—the one at the center of what should have followed its predictable course was veering off track.
He blatantly deviated from the obvious path and charged ahead on his own terms. The unpredictability was frightening.
She couldn’t even entertain the hope that “this time it’ll get better”—that would be a luxury. Naturally, her mind was filled only with terror: “How much worse will it get this time?”
“It’s the food I ate…….”
A voice like her throat was being strangled barely emerged.
“I could have refused, but I…….”
If she had refused and endured glares for years, even until her death, then for actually eating it this time, she would pay an even harsher price. This was why she should have died sooner. If she had died properly, everything would have been resolved!
Lüsenford could not escape responsibility for the crime of murdering the Duchess. That should have happened—but Pheon had blocked it, and she resented him so bitterly for it.
As she glared at him in resentment, to her surprise, she met his eyes, wide with shock. Oh no. She had slipped up.
“……That’s what many people will think.”
Finally coming to her senses, Kaella barely managed to backpedal. Well, could he even understand her, who had come to Lüsenford thinking only of death? She bit down hard on her trembling lips.
“……I know full well that on that day, you were greatly shocked and……frightened by something you’d never experienced before in your life.”
His low voice spoke slowly. His violet eyes, watching her pale face with care for every word, held only cautious concern. There was none of the coldness or indifference she had always felt.
“I’m truly sorry for making you go through such a terrible ordeal that you should never have known in your lifetime. It’s my fault.”
For the first time in her life, Kaella received a sincere apology from Pheon.
“And……there’s something we must make absolutely clear.”
Pausing once, Pheon emphasized firmly.
“You bear no fault whatsoever. Nothing at all. So you don’t need to say such things. There’s no responsibility for you to shoulder, and there never will be. You did nothing wrong.”
The Duchess had done nothing wrong. That was certain. Kaella, her face half-withered and bloodless from her severe illness, simply watched Pheon speak so forcefully.
“You did nothing wrong.”
There was only one reason this man had changed.
‘He’s acting like this because his father is still alive.’
Yes. The Duke of Lüsenford couldn’t ignore the Duke of Ostein. Kaella, who had never once had a solid family backing her, now truly felt the power of her birth family.
She had suffered without one, and now with it, the head maidservant—who she had never been able to touch—was being executed outright.
Kaella looked up at the maids who had come with her from Ostein all the way here. Yes. While her family was still strong, she needed to at least secure a foothold to send those girls back safely. She had titles and people she was responsible for.
“……I’ve heard she raised Your Highness.”
“That’s true. But that was merely her duty as a retainer.”
“Isn’t that a great merit?”
Even Kaella herself hadn’t expected to say such things and end up defending the head maidservant.
“Please spare her life.”
But the words tumbled out. They came out absurdly easily.
“We’ve been married such a short time, and I’m still so new here—starting off with blood being spilled doesn’t seem right.”
The restrained tone and self-deprecating manner were ones she had learned to loathe before her death—or rather, forced herself to learn. In Lüsenford, Kaella had always been the one looked down upon.
“I’m grateful for your decisive and precise judgment, but wouldn’t sparing her life at least be a better beginning than execution?”
In harsh Lüsenford, she needed to create at least one such incident. Since she had spared a Lüsenford native once, later when she sent back the maids and met a painless death, this would help her.
But Pheon shook his head.
“It’s a generous proposal, but I can’t do that. I won’t allow it. How dare she do such a thing to the Duchess. I intend to use this opportunity to straighten out the discipline of Lüsenford’s entire social circle.”
He needed to spill some blood so they could never ignore the young Duchess again and would be too cowed to even whimper. Pheon had no intention of showing mercy.
He had shown enough mercy before his regression. Showing mercy only made them think it was their right and demand more. He had to cut them down from the start and properly establish the Duchess’s authority.
“We’ve only been married a short time. An execution during such an auspicious occasion wouldn’t be good. Moreover, you should consider her merit in raising Your Highness. Spare her life and confiscate her remaining property and title. As for her rudeness to me, I forgive it.”
The more she spoke, the smoother the words flowed. They sounded just like what a truly generous Duchess who had never known hardship would say. Kaella admired herself.
“The Duchess is merciful.”
Merciful, my foot. She snorted inwardly. Mercy? Not at all! It was simply a terrifying reluctance to watch the head maidservant get the death that even Kaella herself couldn’t have. Painful or peaceful, it all ended the same.
She didn’t want to give the head maidservant the “end” that she herself longed for.
Or it was revenge against the head maidservant who had tormented her by handing over the castle keys while keeping all the actual stewards as her own people, refusing to cooperate with the Duchess.
Kaella knew the head maidservant very well. The head maidservant’s pride, dignity, and honor all came from Pheon. And she knew that the head maidservant knew it too. So taking it all away was proper revenge.
“Understood. I’ll spare her life, and only her life.”
Pheon said it crisply, emphasizing it was just her life.
One could say the head maidservant before Kaella’s death and now were different people. But in essence, they were the same. The head maidservant who had tried to break the Duchess from day one deserved hanging. People didn’t change easily.
“And food using Tourberry will never appear on Lüsenford tables again.”
Kaella was startled by that too.
“Is that all right?”
“Those who go on about it being an important dish eat it maybe once a year if there’s no special occasion. What tradition is there in that?”
In front of someone who had nearly died from eating it, Pheon swallowed the words that it wasn’t like you’d die without eating it.
“Traditions are made by the Duke and Duchess together—that becomes the tradition. Let’s research new dishes to serve at banquets together. I’ll change the head chef too, so pick whoever you want.”
It was the words of a gentle husband comforting his young wife who had suffered a great ordeal.
“First, focus on recovering. I hope you get healthy.”
Pheon said it sincerely. He hoped Kaella, who kept collapsing and falling ill, would finally be healthy. He hoped she would leave Lüsenford in good health.
“Thank you.”
Even if the response was utterly perfunctory.
*
After wandering on the brink of death for three days and barely recovering, the Duchess generously spared only the head maidservant’s life.
The reason was consideration for her long service managing Lüsenford Castle. For the sake of the “newlywed ducal couple’s future,” she didn’t die, but she was left with nothing but her life.
Those who strongly sympathized but held lower titles were not granted the Duchess’s mercy and were executed. However, the head maidservant, who alone had all her property and everything confiscated, was banished from Lüsenford.
Where could a banished person go? South? The crime of insulting Ostein and the imperial family would become an even greater one the moment she went south.
There was no place for her in all of Crania. That left only farther north. To places with even harsher terrain and cold, the domain of the Evil Dragon Kaslante—or the barbarians’ lands.
“There must be people who will help the banished one.”
The secretary muttered as he laid out all sorts of blueprints before Pheon.
“They’ll hide or aid her from the shadows. Especially the head maidservant—she had a fair amount of prestige, after all.”
Pheon, immersed in work, looked up at the last words.
“She did.”
The problem was that she built that prestige selectively and sometimes used it to torment others. Pheon had been reflecting on events from before his regression, from when Kaella collapsed until now.
“Above all, the imperial family will hear about this soon. No, they probably already know. It’s impossible to hide from His Imperial Majesty’s eyes.”
Lüsenford was full of watchful eyes everywhere, and plenty of traitors sold information for money and positions in Kline. It was a hard place to live. Pheon’s life defending it had been brutally harsh.
“No, they don’t know yet. It’ll spread soon, but not that quickly.”
The secretary looked at the Duke, who spoke with such certainty, in puzzlement.
“Pardon? But His Imperial Majesty has magic tools to see the world, doesn’t he?”
“He can’t use them for a while.”
The secretary’s expression changed in an instant.
“Really? Is that why you ordered the mine development?”
“Yes.”
The secretary stared at the Duke with an indescribable look before finally letting out a deep sigh of relief.
It was a sigh of liberation from a great burden. He had many questions, but if Pheon stopped there, he couldn’t ask more.
“Understood. I’ll speed things up even more. With the watchful eyes gone, it feels so much lighter.”
Indeed. The Emperor, who knew no magic himself, had gathered magic tools. All the powerful ones in Crania had become his. And the fallen Empress had been found in the room full of those magic tools.
Those in the know pitied her, saying she must have been trying to see her distant son through the mirror in that room. In truth, the Emperor had focused that mirror on Lüsenford to spy on Pheon fighting the Evil Dragon.
Looking back and ruminating only choked him. His mother, Beatrice whom he thought he had to save, the Emperor’s eyes tracking him in real time, and the Evil Dragon constantly clashing against him—it was overwhelming.
So Kaella, who kept appearing to fray his nerves, scatter his focus, and unsettle his mind, was exhausting.
That exhaustion stemmed from how she easily toppled the center Pheon had so firmly held—yet he couldn’t touch her.
Rebuilding that center, straightening his mind, cutting off his gaze that drifted involuntarily, endlessly loathing his tainted blood, the blood that made bastards—it was so tiring.
‘Regarding the Duchess…….’
Even hearing the head maidservant say that with a look like she was dying of embarrassment gave him a headache. The head maidservant knew Pheon reacted negatively to the Duchess and always opened with that on purpose.
Thinking back now, the head maidservant must have been afraid. Afraid that the more refined and educated young Duchess would take over the castle’s inner management, which she had gripped tightly for nearly twenty years, and that she’d be ignored by the young Duchess.
Like an old person forced to admit they were aging with the passage of time—hard to accept, and feeling like her entire self was being denied.
Did Kaella know that about her?
“Lezen.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“Did the banished criminal say I was bewitched by a woman?”
“How did you know? As soon as she heard of the execution, she collapsed and said it.”
At the face of death, her true feelings must have spilled out honestly. With Kaella showing mercy, that true heart had slunk back in.
“How dare she say something even my mother wouldn’t.”
“She should be grateful to the Vice Consort for her mercy her whole life.”
“We’ll see. Call Rolph.”
How dare she regard the noble Duke as her own son. How dare she try to equate herself with the noble duke’s daughter.
Pheon hadn’t forgotten that such people still lurked in the castle. And he hadn’t forgotten that he, in the end, was the one who had to be completely removed from Kaella’s life.
