The Queen's voice carried the quality of an echo rising from a deep mountain pool, bone-chillingly cold yet laced with a mournful, plaintive ache.
Her words, whether rhetorical or genuine, seemed to drop the temperature of the entire hall by several degrees.
The audience chamber fell into instant silence, though the Prime Minister appeared wholly unaffected. He continued to kowtow, stubborn as stone:
"That is correct. I ask that Your Majesty execute the Princess. Only then can we prevent the fate of your assassination."
The Queen pressed her lips together beneath her veil and shook her head slowly.
"Selena... that child would never do such a thing."
"Your Majesty!"
The young Prime Minister, his hair a deep shade of forest green, cried out in urgent desperation:
"This is not a matter of intention. The dragon's curse does not bend to mortal will. Did Your Majesty, in those days, choose of your own free will to kill the late King?!"
He said it.
Holy hell, have you lost your mind?! Just make sure the blood doesn't splash on us!
"!!"
The forbidden words had barely left Arcturus's lips before a crushing pressure, dense and palpable as something solid, came crashing down and settled over the young Prime Minister like a shroud.
In an instant, Arcturus's body was driven into the floor. Spiderweb cracks spread outward from the point of impact.
Even a high-ranking Mage was no match for a warrior of the same tier when it came to physical endurance. Under such merciless punishment, blood began seeping through Arcturus's skin, and shards of white bone tore through his elbows and jutted into open air.
And yet Arcturus did not explode and die. After sustaining the pressure for a brief, terrible moment, the Queen relented just before her Prime Minister reached the point of total collapse.
"Your... Your Majesty... pfah!"
The young man with forest-green hair dragged himself out of the crater, trembling, spitting mouthfuls of blood.
Even so, he pressed his forehead to the floor before the Queen in stubborn supplication:
"Please forgive me. I did not... *cough, cough,* intend to provoke your anger. But only this could make you see the truth clearly..."
"Your Majesty... you have poured too much of your heart into the Princess. It should never have come to this. So long as the evil dragon's curse endures, the succession of Wintertide's throne will repeat its brutal cycle. The next Queen will inevitably kill the reigning one, and the entire kingdom will be swept clean anew."
Whether the blow to his nerves had broken something loose in him, or whether it was raw, unguarded feeling, Arcturus wept openly, tears and mucus running freely down his face. He slammed a clenched fist against the floor:
"We are not men who cling to life out of cowardice! It is only that Wintertide... Wintertide cannot afford to lose you.
The winters grow longer with each passing year. Our kingdom can no longer sustain this cycle of self-destruction, over and over again. If things continue as they are, our children's children will live their whole lives never knowing what spring looks like!"
"And so I beg Your Majesty: for the sake of Wintertide, please order the Princess's execution!"
After Arcturus prostrated himself and refused to rise, the other ministers in the hall exchanged glances with one another. Then, one by one, they sank to their knees, their silent submission a declaration of solidarity with the Prime Minister's appeal.
The deathly silence stretched on for a long time. At last, from behind the curtain came a sound of such sorrow it bordered on sobbing:
"To ask me to kill that child... how is that any different from killing me?"
Arcturus replied, his voice flat and even:
"For you, there may be no difference. But for us, and for all of Wintertide, a Queen is a Queen, and a Princess is a Princess. The two cannot be conflated."
The Queen's silver eyes, luminous behind her veil, passed over Arcturus and swept across the ministers kneeling behind him, then drifted to take in the royal capital of Wintertide.
After a long silence, she finally spoke, her voice hollow and distant:
"Even so, might I not one day bear another child? And then what? You would kill the next Princess as well?"
Arcturus kept his gaze fixed on the blood-smeared tiles before him: "If that is what is required, then yes. Again and again."
For the first time, the Queen's voice carried unmistakable fury:
"So this is... how you intend to flay me alive?"
Arcturus did not answer directly. He simply bowed his head lower, his voice trembling:
"For the continued existence of the kingdom, for the sake of an ancient covenant, I must say these words. Your Majesty, even if you were to grind my bones to dust and scatter them to the wind, I ask only that you consider this counsel, and that you take pity... on the people of this kingdom."
"Take pity on you all... and who is there to take pity on me..."
The Queen seemed at last to be driven to fury by her ministers' collective pressure. The black curtain billowed outward, and the crushing aura of a great Mage descended over the entire hall.
At the very height of this knife's-edge standoff, a voice rang out, clear and bright as a silver bell, and shattered the tension.
"My, what a lively scene! I seem to have walked in on something rather interesting. Something about... whether or not to have me executed?"
From beyond the entrance of the audience chamber, a graceful silhouette made her unhurried way inside, both hands clasped behind her back, stepping lightly and deliberately until she reached the center of the hall.
Beneath an elegant and exquisitely tailored white formal dress was a pleated skirt, and her full, slender legs were wrapped in black over-the-knee stockings that left a tantalizing band of bare skin between hem and stocking top.
Her long, jet-black hair, silken and perfectly straight, set against skin as delicate and white as fresh snow, imprinted themselves on the minds of everyone present with the force of something absolute. The ministers cried out in startled unison:
"The Princess?!"
Snow White raised one hand in a casual wave.
"What is it? Why the fuss? Wasn't it agreed that I could go wherever I liked, so long as I didn't leave the castle?"
From behind the curtain, the Queen withdrew her Mage's aura at that same moment, her eyes settling on the Princess with an expression too layered to name.
"Selena..."
The face of Princess Selena was a perfect mirror of the Queen's own face in her youth, and with good reason. The Princess had, after all, been separated from the Queen's very self.
In terms of social convention, they were mother and daughter. In terms of blood, they were without question identical twins.
"I heard there is a foreign prince who has proposed to me. Is this true?"
Selena walked into the center of the hall and turned a smile toward the Prime Minister, who was in a rather sorry state.
Arcturus withdrew the letter in silence and presented it to Selena.
He was careful not to look directly at the Princess's face. The royal family of Wintertide possessed a beauty of absolute, almost supernatural potency, and to let one's guard down was to be captured by their charm as surely as by a curse.
During formal audiences, the Queen always kept her face concealed behind a veil. The Princess, however, had no such habit.
Selena took the letter and read through it carefully. Then she broke into a pleased smile, tapping the paper lightly with one finger:
"Mm... this is wonderfully written. This prince who calls himself Faust has excellent taste! Every word of praise here strikes me as nothing but the plain truth."
Snow White tilted her exquisitely beautiful chin upward and pressed a hand to her chest with satisfaction:
"Hmph, I knew it. My beauty is without rival. I've managed to captivate a foreign prince from a distant land who has never once laid eyes on me."
Arcturus said coldly, "Princess, there is nothing remotely amusing about any of this."
"It is precisely because of your beauty that we find ourselves in such an impossible position."
Selena knitted her delicate brows:
"And what would you have me do? I was born this beautiful. Are you suggesting I give it up?"
Arcturus shook his head with a bitter, mirthless smile:
"If only there were a way! But this beauty is a cursed thing, one that cannot be relinquished by any means. Even so, your beauty should never surpass Her Majesty's..."
"Arcturus!"
The Queen's sharp reprimand cut through the hall, her voice heavy with anger at the Prime Minister's near-tearful words:
"How dare you presume to suggest that Selena's beauty surpasses mine?!"