The Reason for Marriage

Raina busied herself with the papers in front of her for a few moments before speaking again.

“We – the Bureau, that is – sincerely believe that it is a good thing that King Daniel has ascended to the throne. He is the right person for this troubling era and you’d be hard-pressed to find any one of us who disagreed with that. So, my Queen,” Raina grinned at Iveca, “Although it may have been sudden and unexpected; I want to offer my sincere congratulations on your wedding. Please be happy.”

It was a light greeting with a strangely familiar tone, as though it were given to an old friend.

“Raina,” Iveca lowered her eyes for a moment, then said in a calm tone, “You knew me, didn’t you?”

“Pardon?”

“You knew me at the Bureau of Investigation, right?” Iveca clarified. Raina took her turn to shift her eyes to the floor.

“My Queen, I have already told you that you chose to forget for a reason. I am not in a position to be talking about the things you have forgotten.”

“When I lived in the Count’s estate, I didn’t want to get caught being left-handed, so I tried to write with my right hand, but in reality, it was more comfortable to write with my left hand.”

Raina looked confused for a moment. Iveca blinked, returning her pen to her. Raina took it, and that small act dawned the realisation of what Iveca was talking about.

“In the Bureau of Investigation, I guess I comfortably wrote with my left, right? Or else you wouldn’t have placed the pen in my left hand.”

There was a moment of silence before Iveca continued.

“Please… Can you explain a little about me during my time in the Bureau of Investigation? In those missing four years.”

Raina sighed. She could see the desperation for some sort of answer in Iveca’s eyes, as purple and intense as ever.

“I understand your… desire for more information, my Queen. But I didn’t expect to be caught off guard like this.”

“I…”

“Those days are gone, my Queen. Please understand this,” Raina interrupted.

Iveca bit her lip but said nothing more. Raina looked at her for a moment, then asked in a low voice, “Why are you so obsessed with those days of your life?”

“I’ve never really felt like I belong anywhere. But there… there I felt…” Her voice cracked and trailed off, but Iveca did not cry. It didn’t take anything special for her memories of the Bureau to be fond ones. Where people didn’t avoid eye contact with her, or whisper behind her back just loud enough for her to hear. That was enough for Iveca.

Raina remained silent for a while, examining her new Queen. Dressed in the finery of that ostentatious, royal style the Queen reminded her of a little lost bird, who had fallen from the nest, with no idea how to get to where she felt safe. Raina spoke quietly.

“You are a member of the royal family now. Your past is gone and this is your life now.”

Iveca did not say anything in response. A member of the royal family? No part of her felt like that was the truth, even in this palace. Daniel had told her to work at the Judicial Affair Bureau as normal, married her, and had asked her to provide him with a successor. She couldn’t help but feel like she was further from being a member of the Royal family than anyone else. Anyone else could have been asked, had they been in her position. She knew her life was one of meeting standards. Her old family, the Esselburns, would not accept her if she didn’t meet their standards. The Bureau required grades, aptitude tests, all manner of small and large measures to make sure she was fit for the role. But she felt no sense of belonging to the Royal family yet. It didn’t feel possible to; there had been no test, no way to prove her worth. She was just here.

Looking at Iveca’s rather sullen face, Reina lowered her eyes again.

“When you were still working in the Bureau of Investigation, you were the wisest and the most rational employee with no close second. You received a lot of love from your colleagues because you were competent and reliable,” Raina said, before pausing for a moment, “You chose to erase your memories. So, please believe in that choice.”

Iveca suddenly felt even more lonely. She knew that Raina could have just chosen to tell her she was a normal, ordinary employee. But instead, if she had meant what she said if she did well in the Bureau of Investigation, there was no way she could have – or would have – chosen to have her erased her memory by herself. Whatever had happened must have been bad enough to make her want to lose four years of her life to avoid even coming into contact with it again.

“Raina…”

“My Queen, please don’t be so informal.”

“Is it not my choice to be formal or informal?”

Whatever Raina was thinking of saying, she clamped her mouth shut before she did. Iveca’s expression was dark. Suddenly, Raina realized that Iveca was only forcing her expressions at this point – she hadn’t smiled properly so much as she had been forcing the corners of her mouth to go up.

Daniel came to visit Iveca as the sunset shone red light through the windows into the palace. She attempted to abandon the genealogy papers she had been studying since Raina left, and grab a teacup to provide a drink for her husband, but as she moved, he grabbed her arm.

“I don’t need tea, thank you.”

Iveca was startled by his sudden movement. The heat of his hand on her arm brought memories of the night before flooding back. The feeling was so intense and the memory so good that she felt the heat spread out from under his hand and throughout the rest of her body, and she did everything she could to not openly blush.

“It seems you’ve been working hard,” Daniel said. He laughed as he looked at the dense genealogy parchment and paper spread out on the table, covered in handwritten notes. Iveca stared at her husband, almost seeing him from outside her vision, in a third-person perspective. A young king with a gentle, sweet, and beautiful appearance. It only reiterated to her that she still did not know the true reason for this marriage.

“Let’s take a break from all this history, hmm?”

“Pardon?”

“You should be aware of the past, but you shouldn’t be tied up with it.” Daniel thumbed through the letters for a moment, releasing Iveca’s arm. “When the royal family worries too much, they see the past rather than the future. It is difficult to prepare for the future, but it is easy to show off the glory of the past. But the easy way always leads to destruction, in the end.”

Suddenly, Iveca remembered Raina’s words. He was the right person for this era. So why did such a person choose me?

Daniel pulled out a pen from the inside pocket of his jacket. She knew the branding from her days at the Bureau – whoever made this pen, also provided stationery for the offices there.

Daniel’s voice faded in and brought her attention back. She glanced and saw he had uncapped the pen and drawn five circles on the parchment in front of them. “These are all you need to memorize. Since the Queen still has a lot of work to do in the future, I thought I’d save you some time. There’s Queen Evena, who is said to have established a system of affiliated organizations 100 years ago, and King Karl who married her.”

No one in the Kingdom of Amethan did not know Queen Evena. Evena, a commoner but a great wizard, had given a tremendous magical blessing to the Amethan palace and its affiliated organizations. She was also cited as the biggest factor in the enrichment of Amethan for over a hundred years, by guaranteeing the independence of affiliated organizations and expanding employment for commoners, so that all could provide for the kingdom. But now, as the mana was disappearing, the foundation she had built was beginning to erode.

“William, my first brother, who pledged his allegiance to the Emperor… Ruben, who insisted on technology instead of magic, and stood on the side of the rebels to abandon the empire.”

The last of the five circles he had drawn was around his name.

“Although I support the Emperor, I set up the Bureau of Technology because I could not trust magic anymore.”

Iveca felt a question bubbling up inside her, about the sibling Daniel had declined to mention and asked out of sheer curiosity.

“What about Princess Ashe?”

“No one knows about what truly happened to her. So, it’s meaningless to discuss her.”

Daniel’s reply was gloomy. Iveca saw as he twisted the pen in his hands that it was engraved, with initials. E.J.

E.J.? She couldn’t stop questioning who that could be. Presumably, it was someone else’s pen – you don’t gift a pen to someone with your own initials on it. But who had it belonged to? And stranger still, was the fact that the pen was a ready-made one, that you could find from a supplier, or in a store. If a precious person had presented it to the royal family, no matter how high-end it was, he would have chosen a custom pen over an off-the-shelf product that was commonly bought on the street.

He put the pen back into his pocket and smiled. Iveca was surprised yet again by just how pretty that smile was. The soft curved red lips, blue eyes like the sky, and blonde hair shining in the sunset were so beautiful that it was hard to take her eyes off of him.

“So stop memorizing genealogy…” He took her hand and slowly stood up. “Let’s go memorize something else.”

“Something else?”

Daniel led her out of the room, and back into the room with the gorgeous bed they had shared the night before. Iveca instantly turned red, but when Daniel casually pushed the painting hung on the wall next to the bed, she was so surprised that she felt her breath hitch.

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“What is this?” she said, puzzled.

“There are so many secret passages in the royal palace. So that you can evacuate in case of an emergency. Only the royal family knows the exact path, and if you don’t memorize it well, you might wander off and die. There are many traps along the wrong path.”

“I see.”

He held her hand tightly and walked down the dark path that the painting had made way to reveal. There was no light, so she could not see anything at all. But the body temperature that connected them through his hand was warm and made her feel safe.

Raina’s words, about the Bureau’s trust in her husband, came to her as they walked, once again forcing Iveca to truly think about the situation she found herself in. She didn’t know anything about him. Iveca had to try to put together a lot of information about him from other sources. Anriq, his escort, had been the closest to the truth so far, saying she should not believe as he would take advantage of her. But Raina saw him as others did, wise and kind. How should his wife judge him?