Chapter 81
“Ibella, are you ready?”
Jeremiah asked as he pushed away the Guide who was still clinging to his arm. Ibella, who had been forced to sit across from him and watch everything Jeremiah did with his Guides, hurriedly opened her mouth.
“Of course, Your Highness.”
“Yeah. You’d better not even dream of betraying the Nabel Empire. After all, the only place that would treat someone like you this well is Nabel.”
Ibella fell silent and lowered her head. Hesna flicked her eyes over Ibella’s complexion. On her neatly made-up, composed face, all expression had vanished, so it was impossible to tell what she was thinking.
‘The core of this plan is that woman, so the Crown Prince won’t ever intend to let her go.’
Treating Guides according to their rank was the same in any country. In that sense, Hesna was placing her hopes on the Karnan Empire, because she didn’t want to remain the Guide of the Nabel Empire’s Crown Prince like this.
She was Jeremiah’s Guide, but only because she was being kept for the reason that, among the A-Class Guides in the Nabel Empire, her match rate with Jeremiah was the highest.
Since it wasn’t even especially high compared to other Transcendents, Jeremiah was always dissatisfied with her guiding, and that dissatisfaction often expressed itself as violence.
A Transcendent’s violence was fatal even when it was ‘light’. She had already narrowly escaped death three times.
No matter how luxurious a life he promised her, she didn’t have the slightest attachment to living as the Crown Prince’s mistress. In the first place, even this relationship existed only because her family had sold her to the imperial family.
Just like the other two Guides, if she ran away, her family would die. She knew that, but… faced with how they only cared about their own safety and wealth, any affection she had for them as family had evaporated long ago.
‘If they’d cared about me even a little, they wouldn’t have sold me to the imperial family.’
If it had been unavoidable, then they should have left the Nabel Empire even if it meant giving up their noble title. The last reason Hesna hadn’t been able to abandon her family was her older sister, the only one who had worried about her, but that sister died while giving birth.
It was because of her husband and his family, who didn’t call for a Priestess even though they knew she was suffering through a difficult labor. They stubbornly refused, saying that giving birth didn’t require the goddess’s help.
They didn’t want to pay the large donation required to call a Priestess. While they insisted that Hesna’s family should bear the cost, both the mother, who suffered in agony for two whole days, and the baby died.
It was murder.
Hesna tried to have her brother-in-law and his family punished, but Jeremiah didn’t help her. He spoke as if it couldn’t be helped.
‘It was a tragedy, Hesna. Stop blaming that family, the victims. They’ve suffered enough.’
What suffering did they go through? People who owned three carriages gilded in gold, and refused because they didn’t want to donate a mere sum to the temple?
The one who endured two days of tearing pain and died was my sister.
They spoke as if they never imagined she would die from something like that. Everyone gives birth, don’t they? Worse, they acted as though they were the ones who’d been harmed, saying they’d taken an unhealthy woman as a daughter-in-law and the child had died.
“Hesna.”
At Jeremiah’s call, her slender shoulders flinched. On either side of him sat the other two Guides, Desirée and Vera. Hesna sat beside Ibella.
Even though she was A-Class, her match rate with Jeremiah wasn’t good, so the sensation during guiding was unpleasant. The ones who guided Jeremiah most often were Desirée and Vera. Both of them had match rates with him that were pushing the high sixty percent range.
“What are you thinking about so intently?”
“I was thinking of the brown forest on Yat Hill. I thought that by now, the leaves throughout the forest would have turned golden.”
The brown forest in her hometown was limited to summer only and temporary, but there were times when its leaves turned yellow. At her words that she had been thinking of home, the sharpness in Jeremiah’s eyes loosened, as if it were trivial.
“Ah. You used to like things like that. Fine. When this is over, I’ll let you go down to your hometown once.”
“Thank you, Your Highness.”
Ever since Hesna became his Guide, he had not allowed her to return to her hometown even once, fearing that a precious A-Class Guide might run away.
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