Chapter 4

“So, he picked up something you dropped?” the blond man demanded, distaste thick in every syllable.

He was the same hulking brute who had threatened Kosha so violently in the interrogation room. His name was Gosrick, and improbable as it seemed, this terrifying man served as Prince Lucien’s closest and most trusted aide.

Searching his memory, Kosha vaguely recalled seeing him at Lucien’s side on the day of the grand return. Gosrick possessed every feature one might expect from a battle-hardened knight: a massive frame, savage eyes, and a long, jagged scar carved across one cheek.

Even so, Kosha no longer found him quite as pants-wettingly terrifying as he had during their first brutal encounter.

Perhaps constant exposure had simply forced him to grow accustomed to the giant’s presence. Perhaps he had gradually realized that Gosrick’s temperament was not nearly as savage as his monstrous appearance suggested. Or perhaps it was only because Gosrick belonged, unquestionably and implicitly, to Lucien.

Gosrick leaned closer, his suspicion sharpening each word. “Is that why you started liking him?”

Kosha released a long, weary sigh and shook his head.

No, that wasn’t it at all.

How could anyone develop genuine feelings for another person over such a fleeting, insignificant gesture?

Love, infatuation, or whatever foolish label one chose to give it was never a simple, neatly defined thing that passed cleanly from one stage into the next. That brief encounter had merely been the spark, the first moment when Kosha had truly glimpsed the living, breathing man hidden behind the famous name.

Ah. So that is who Lucien is.

Catalysts were often trivial in themselves. What mattered was the terrifying, unstoppable chain of consequences that followed.

Why had Kosha tossed and turned that entire night, strangely restless and unable to sleep until dawn? Why had he taken such meticulous, uncharacteristic care while preparing his meager breakfast the next morning? Why had he impulsively cut a branch of sweet osmanthus and kept it in a bottle of water until every flower withered, despite having no logical reason to do so? Why had he found himself craning his neck and edging closer whenever the prince’s illustrious name arose in idle conversation at the village square?

Long before his conscious mind understood what his body was doing, Kosha had joined a vast procession in the freezing darkness before sunrise. He had no business being there and no task to complete. He had dragged himself into the cold for one pathetic reason alone.

He wanted to catch a fleeting glimpse of Lucien before the prince departed on yet another dangerous expedition.

Explaining each tiny, agonizing step of that gradual and foolish transformation to this scarred brute would have been exhausting.

“You probably wouldn’t understand,” Kosha muttered so faintly that Gosrick could not tell whether the words had been spoken aloud or whether a stray thought had simply escaped his lips.

Gosrick’s thick brow furrowed, and his mouth opened as he prepared to interrogate the frail mage again.

Kosha preempted him by pointing one bandaged finger toward the table. “Could you slice those stabilizer roots over there?”

The massive knight merely stared at him in heavy, disbelieving silence.

“I mean, only if you’re willing,” Kosha added hastily as panic spiked through his chest. “No, never mind. I can do it. I should be the one doing it, of course. It’s my job, after all.”

The longer the giant remained silent, the more icy fear crept through Kosha’s veins. He lowered his gaze and began tripping over his own words.

With a sharp, aggrieved sigh, Gosrick reached one meaty hand toward the pale object Kosha had indicated. “This one?”

“…Yes.”

Kosha’s bruised fingertips remained safely buried beneath thick layers of medicinal bandages.

He had never been particularly nimble, even on his best days, but with his hands in their present condition, his movements had become almost comically clumsy. If he attempted to wield a sharp knife now, he was just as likely to slice off one of his fingers as he was to cut the tough root properly.

They could not afford that kind of bloody delay when they were already racing against the clock. Talented mages could technically continue casting magic after losing a limb, but that grim fact hardly made amputating a finger a brilliant idea.

Gosrick drew a wickedly sharp dagger from his belt and studied the plant. “How do I do this?” He turned the dried root awkwardly between his thick fingers. “Slice it lengthwise?”

“Yes, please,” Kosha instructed softly. “As thinly as you possibly can.”

Bending his massive frame over the delicate task, Gosrick began painstakingly shaving the dried root into slender, even strips. The sight was undeniably comical: a hulking, broad-backed warrior hunched over a small table, meticulously carving medicinal roots with the tip of a comparatively tiny but lethal blade.

Kosha bit down painfully on his swollen lip, desperate to smother the inappropriate laugh bubbling in his throat. True to his vigilant knightly nature, Sir Gosrick appeared to possess eyes in the back of his head.

Without turning, the knight growled, “Are you laughing at me?”

“No, sir,” Kosha lied at once.

Lowering his head, Kosha devoted exaggerated attention to the medicinal ingredients spread across the table.

Myrrh and hyssop oil…

Gosrick watched as Kosha carefully measured each ingredient, clicking his tongue in lingering disbelief. He had not truly intended to interrogate the frail boy without mercy. He simply could not understand how this little fool could behave so casually under such dire, life-threatening circumstances.

It was deeply unsettling.

Objectively speaking, the young man seated before him looked like a complete wreck. His clothes were shabby and badly stained, while his thin shoulders curled inward in a perpetual defensive slouch. A wild, neglected mane of filthy hair covered half his face, so tangled and hopelessly matted that one strand could scarcely be distinguished from another. Beneath that greasy curtain, his cheeks and lips were swollen, split, and severely lacerated.

Kosha had been slapped several more times that very day, usually because his trembling voice had failed to answer a question clearly enough. Perhaps a few harsh blows to the face did not qualify as particularly severe treatment by the cursed prince’s present standards, but the brutality was still difficult to stomach.

“You look like a beaten dog, and yet you’re actually happy?” Gosrick demanded, fully intending the remark as an insult.

The strange, seemingly dim-witted mage appeared oblivious to the mockery. Kosha offered a small, awkward, almost sheepish smile and lifted one bony shoulder. “It’s not that I’m happy. I’m just… fine.”

Gosrick’s scarred expression twisted as though he had heard something grotesque.

Noticing the knight’s rising disgust, Kosha hurried to placate him. “It’s entirely my fault, really. His Highness Lucien isn’t usually such a cruel person.”

Gosrick merely stared at him, offering no comfort in return.

“His Highness is the true victim here,” Kosha continued, his trembling voice growing more uncertain with every word. “And I certainly didn’t brew it deliberately. Never. I would never have done such a terrible thing on purpose.”

As the pathetic excuses stumbled from his cracked lips, guilt began pricking at his conscience once again.

Kosha had brewed a bungled, haphazard love potion on a whim, and through some cosmic joke, Lucien had actually consumed it. He could not begin to fathom how such an impossible thing had happened, but the logistics no longer mattered. The true catastrophe was that the magical concoction had gone completely and horribly wrong.

Kosha’s illegal brew had been intended as a standard love potion, designed to force the drinker to fall desperately and unconditionally in love with the first person they saw upon waking.

Yet after swallowing the glowing liquid, Lucien had fallen in love with no one.

His reaction had been the violent opposite.

Earlier, while carefully tracing the chaotic currents of magic lingering inside Lucien’s body, Kosha had ventured a dangerous question as delicately as he could.

“Wait. By any chance, the person His Highness saw immediately after drinking the potion…”

The confirmation had come from the last person he expected.

“It was me,” Gosrick had confessed with grim solemnity.

Lucien, lounging crookedly in his ornate chair, had responded only with a jagged, derisive scoff.

Kosha had looked between the two imposing men in bewilderment. Lucien certainly did not appear to harbor any tender or romantic feelings for his scarred aide.

By all accounts, the prince had been buried in administrative work that day. His grueling schedule had stretched so late into the night that he was forced to finish the remaining tasks in his private bedchamber. When an attendant entered as usual with a cup of warmed mulled wine, the only other person in the room was Gosrick, who had arrived to deliver the final tedious report of the day.

Drinking warm mulled wine whenever work ran late or exhaustion set in was one of Lucien’s long-standing habits. The attendant responsible for bringing it had performed the same duty reliably for at least two years.

In hindsight, the servant’s brief and nervous hesitation upon seeing Gosrick in the room had certainly been suspicious.

With dawn approaching, however, both men had been far too exhausted to quarrel over something that seemed so trivial. Lucien had accepted the poisoned cup without a second thought.

He had swallowed only a few mouthfuls of the spiced wine when he suddenly clutched his head in agony and dropped the cup. Gosrick had instinctively stepped forward to catch his collapsing lord.

When Lucien awoke moments later, his eyes locked on Gosrick first.

He immediately shoved the massive knight away with startling violence. Without pause or explanation, the prince lunged forward, seized the terrified attendant by the hair, and smashed the man’s skull into the stone wall.

Thrown backward and utterly blindsided by the uncharacteristic assault, Gosrick had been too stunned to restrain Lucien before the prince began mercilessly pummeling the bleeding servant, screaming again and again as he demanded to know who had ordered the poisoning.

“He, uh… he doesn’t usually go that far,” Gosrick had added defensively while recounting the incident.

Even without the knight’s flimsy explanation, that much had been obvious.

Was Lucien not renowned throughout the kingdom for his extraordinary mercy and levelheadedness, maintaining his composure even on the bloodiest battlefields?

Kosha had merely nodded in terrified understanding.

Regardless of the precise trigger, from that cursed moment onward, Lucien had displayed an intensely impulsive and viciously violent temperament. He slapped innocent servants without provocation, hurled acidic insults and shocking obscenities regardless of the time or place, and appeared constantly poised on the verge of another bloody outburst.

To borrow Gosrick’s own grim phrasing, “You never know when he’s going to explode.”

Several bloody incidents, which could only generously be described as accidents, had already occurred during high-profile official engagements. Eventually, the royal handlers had been forced to drag Lucien into strict seclusion and suspend all his public activities indefinitely until the horrifying matter could be quietly resolved.

The disaster had occurred exactly seven days ago.

Considering the immense political and military responsibilities resting on the prince’s shoulders, the situation was catastrophic in every conceivable respect.

How in the world had my potion gone so horribly wrong?

Kosha had not used any particularly complex or forbidden magic during the brewing process, and nothing like this had ever happened when he crafted his usual mundane medicines.

Of course, one small and hysterical corner of his mind recognized that an entirely different, deeply awkward catastrophe would have unfolded if the potion had worked as intended and forced the radiant Prince Lucien to fall madly in love with the scarred, hulking Gosrick.

In any case, the blame rested entirely on Kosha’s frail shoulders. He had been the fool who brewed a dangerous potion without permission and without truly understanding the precise magical formula, acting on nothing more than a stupid romantic whim.

Being beaten black and blue a few times was simply the rightful consequence of his monumental stupidity, a fact Kosha accepted with calm and depressing resignation.

Lucien was the true victim.

The prince had to be suffering far more intensely while trapped beneath such an absurd, mind-altering influence.

“I’m certain His Highness is suffering far more than I ever could,” Kosha murmured despondently, staring at his bandaged hands.

For the briefest and strangest moment, Gosrick’s scarred expression shifted into something peculiar. His features were so rugged and naturally severe, however, that the precise emotion remained difficult to decipher.

The knight opened his mouth as though preparing to argue, then apparently reconsidered and slowly stroked his bearded chin.

“Hmm.”

After a tense pause, he gestured impatiently toward the bubbling brewing apparatus. “Right. Just make an antidote, or do whatever else you need to purge the damn potion’s influence. Bring him back to his senses before he kills someone important.”

“Y-yes. Of course. I’ll do it.” Kosha nodded frantically, sending his tangled hair flying around his bruised face.

In truth, the young mage possessed no confidence whatsoever in his abilities.

Still, it was an established and ironclad principle of magic that a curse or affliction caused by a particular potion could be resolved properly and safely only by the mage who had created it. A mage vastly more powerful than the original creator might be capable of intervening by force, but such powerful mages tended to be insular and miserly creatures who guarded their time and talents with jealous devotion.

Even the esteemed royal mage who had initially diagnosed Lucien’s violent condition as potion-induced had flatly refused to involve himself any further, washing his hands of the entire mess.

“So, should I keep chopping this?” Gosrick held up a dirty, tangled cluster of knotted grass roots and waited for instruction.

Kosha studied the meager pile for a moment, then nodded firmly.

Dense roots accepted magical infusion far more readily than fragile leaves or stems, so the more raw material they had, the better their chances of success. A properly trained mage would never need to rely so heavily on physical mediums, but Kosha was far from proper.

“Yes,” he instructed softly. “Just a little more.”

Hiding his faintly trembling hands beneath his stained robes, Kosha watched the knight work. His magical abilities were so pitifully inadequate that he had no choice but to depend on physical ingredients.

The simple fact that the castle guards willingly supplied every rare material he requested remained the only slender thread of hope he possessed.

***