1 — I Cannot Take Someone As Ugly As You For My Wife

I watched the denunciation unfolding before my eyes with a sinking feeling in my chest.

Had that girl really done something terrible enough to be pressed this far?

Before I knew it, a sigh had slipped from my lips.

The Crown Prince Arios of the Kingdom of Luminous, one of the neighboring Karaban Union Kingdom’s realms, was condemning the girl who was about to become his official fiancée, Shitoen Balimore.

I had heard she had been living in the Kingdom of Luminous for about two years prior to the engagement, so I supposed the two fiancés at least knew each other’s faces.

Following custom, Lady Shitoen was covered from head to toe in a white veil.

From where we guests sat, we could not even imagine what she looked like.

When she entered the cathedral, for a moment I thought she looked like a moving white cocoon.

“From here, Crown Prince Arios will lift her veil and kiss her on the forehead.”

Mother, seated beside me, secretly explained it to me.

Apparently, that was all there was to the engagement ceremony.

In other words, both I and Mother, the queen of the Kingdom of Tidros, had been invited all this way to this engagement ceremony solely to watch a complete stranger get a little forehead kiss. We had swayed in a carriage for seven days and only arrived yesterday in Lise, the royal capital of the Karaban Union Kingdom.

Ordinarily, after this engagement ceremony, we would attend the customary royal social gathering, where the ladies would trade remarks like, “Oh, is your son still unmarried?” “He is. Please introduce him to someone nice if you know anyone,” and I, a man with absolutely no luck with women, would be subjected to something very close to a public execution.

Twenty-five years old, unmarried, and not even engaged. People always wondered whether there had to be some reason for that.

There isn’t.

I’m just not popular.

No, more to the point, when attending an engagement ceremony in a neighboring kingdom like this, wouldn’t it normally be the king or the crown prince escorting Mother?

So why me, I had wondered.

But now I knew.

It was that.

She was arranging marriage meetings.

Mother wanted to parade me in front of the ladies and say, “What do you think of my son?”

But still…

No, I do feel bad for Mother, you know? She goes so far as to say things like, “My son is such a good boy. Why do people keep turning down marriage meetings with him? None of them have any eye for quality.”

…Yeah.

My eldest brother, the crown prince, and my second brother, who married into another country, both took after Mother. They’re androgynous beauties, or rather… smooth, polished princes.

I took after Father.

No, it’s an honor, really. I resemble His Majesty, after all. Mother said she was relieved about that too. Apparently people are always quick to ask, “Whose child is he, exactly?”

But.

Looking like His Majesty does not mean having a fashionable face.

How do I put it…?

My face is just thoroughly masculine.

There are hardly any men taller than me even in the knightly order.

I’m not fat, but the more I train, the more thick, broad muscle builds on my arms, back, thighs, and the rest, and well… I don’t look anything like what people picture when they think of a duke.

On top of that, every winter I lead the knights out on frontier patrol.

And while I was scattering bandits and rebels… the nickname I ended up with was “The Winter Bear of Tidros.”

I mean, come on!

While I’m on frontier patrol, yes, I slack off on shaving! It’s not the royal court. It’s all men, and at night we sit around campfires. A beard is fine!

…And that was how I ended up with that nickname… The moment I returned to the royal capital, women shrieked… Some even said I smelled.

I had already resigned myself to being single for the rest of my life.

And yet Mother was desperately trying to find me a spouse.

Every time I got turned down, it quietly took its toll on my heart…

So I had been dreading the ladies’ review of my worth that was going to unfold after this.

And yet, of all things, Crown Prince Arios had started speaking of “breaking off the engagement” during the ceremony.

This was… going to get ugly.

I was sure of it.

Tonight was not going to be about finding my future bride.

This broken engagement was going to become the one grand topic of the evening.

At first, I had watched the developments with eager excitement.

But gradually, I started to hate it.

The cause was that Crown Prince Arios.

He was revolting, plain and simple.

That voice of his, trembling slightly with intoxication in himself, was exquisitely disgusting.

He was clearly drunk on himself.

My eldest brother is a crown prince too, but he’s nowhere near this revolting.

If anything, he’s my pride. The pride of our nation too.

But.

Was it really all right for this country’s crown prince to be like this?

Was this considered normal here? I looked around the cathedral.

The people in attendance were primarily the sovereigns and relatives of the Karaban Union Kingdom.

Just as the name Union Kingdom suggests, Karaban consists of five kingdoms.

When the Elect King dies, each kingdom selects a representative, and they decide who will become the next Elect King.

The current Elect King is Norris Jiena Luminous.

He stands at the head of one of the five royal houses, the House of Luminous.

He is also the actual father of Crown Prince Arios, who was presently barking incessantly at a young girl in the middle of the red carpet running through the cathedral.

King Norris.

This man is a distant relative of my mother, the queen of the Kingdom of Tidros.

My mother married into Tidros as a sign of goodwill.

It was through that connection that we were invited to this auspicious occasion, the crown prince’s engagement ceremony.

Guests like us seemed to be rare.

Apart from Mother and me, there were only about three other groups with no ties to the Karaban Union Kingdom.

Well… I suppose that helped preserve the dignity of the Kingdom of Luminous, at least.

The corner of my mouth twisted before I realized it.

For better or worse, the crown prince’s idiotic conduct had been kept from leaking to other nations as much as possible.

When we left, they would probably impose a gag order.

“And on top of that, even though Mail spoke to you, you ignored her over and over again!”

Crown Prince Arios raised his voice even louder than before.

Whoa, that startled me.

Without moving anything but my gaze, I turned it toward the crown prince of the neighboring kingdom.

Crown Prince Arios stood in the center of the cathedral.

Facing him was his fiancée, Shitoen Balimore, wrapped like a cocoon in a veil of white silk.

And standing behind Crown Prince Arios was a girl named Mail Harty, dressed in splendid, dazzling clothes.

She was the girl he had brought out from among the assembled guests before beginning his denunciation, and the extravagance of her clothing was utterly out of place. She looked more like the fiancée herself.

From the way the nearby guests had muttered, “That’s Mail. You know, from House Harty, the barons,” and “Ah. The crown prince’s lover,” with clear bitterness, she was probably something like a publicly acknowledged mistress.

That explained it, then.

Those were not clothes some mere baron’s daughter could wear. Taste aside.

The girl called Mail kept herself small behind Crown Prince Arios, clutching his sleeve and lowering her eyes.

As though to say poor Lady Shitoen, the one being criticized, was pitiable, she would occasionally raise her face and make her lips tremble as if she wanted to say something to Crown Prince Arios, only to lower her gaze again in the end.

That did not look to me like modesty.

It looked like a shameless actress’s performance.

To begin with, if she were truly a timid woman, she would have already fled after being glared at by all the high-ranking men assembled here.

That’s right.

Every single guest was glaring at the crown prince and his lover.

And yet.

Crown Prince Arios had misunderstood.

He believed Lady Shitoen was the one being condemned.

It was so embarrassing I could hardly bear it. What, exactly, was he so pleased with…?

Looking at the elevated state Crown Prince Arios was in only made him even more revolting.

For some time now, he had been basking in the guests’ collective gaze and speaking as if he were some actor on a stage.

He was loudly declaring things like how Shitoen had ignored Mail and failed to respond when spoken to, but from my point of view, it is those of higher rank who speak to those below them. For someone of lower rank to address someone above them is out of the question.

As the fiancée of Crown Prince Arios, Lady Shitoen was, if I recalled correctly, descended from one of the five kingdoms.

A member of a royal line with voting rights.

Just because they happened to know each other, it did not mean the daughter of an insignificant baronial house could simply speak to her. In the wrong setting, Lady Shitoen would have had no choice but to pretend she had not heard.

And now he was saying she “deliberately left Mail out of a tea party,” but the difference in status was far too great. Why would anyone think a baron’s daughter could take part in a tea gathering at the level of royalty?

He was too ignorant.

No.

Having been granted the highest possible rank as crown prince, he did not understand the social order, particularly within aristocratic society.

And together with Mail, who understood it just as little, he must have been making a racket over how she had been “bullied” and “slighted.”

At the moment, he was saying, “She deliberately bumped into her during the dance,” but who knew about that.

Could that girl even dance properly?

Wasn’t it more likely that she was the one who crashed into her?

Read the room.

I turned my gaze toward the hall.

The seating had been arranged facing each other across the central aisle.

The assembled lords seated there had, at first, murmured, panicked, and shown clear confusion.

But now they were all staring at the three in the center with utterly freezing eyes.

No, at the crown prince.

A dry laugh slipped from me.

Crown Prince Arios himself still seemed convinced that those icy stares were directed at Lady Shitoen. Mail as well.

But no one here could possibly direct anger or contempt toward Lady Shitoen. Sympathy, perhaps, but nothing more.

After all.

Even as she was being abused in front of the crowd, the cocoon-wrapped girl had not uttered a single word back to Crown Prince Arios.

At first I thought she was simply enduring it in silence, but bit by bit I came to feel that she had given up.

No matter what she said, it would be useless.

That kind of resignation seemed to wrap around her together with the veil.

“Saryu.”

My name was called in a quiet voice, and I blinked and looked to my side.

Mother was watching me, hiding her mouth behind an opened fan.

“What is it?”

“You still don’t have a lover, do you?”

What was that, all of a sudden?

“That’s… right.”

I hesitated a little.

“At present, I do not.”

I answered honestly. In truth, just before turning twenty, I had my heart broken and wept to my adjutant Raul that I had had enough. My appearance might frighten women, but it would never make them love me.

“I understand.”

What, exactly, had she understood?

When our eyes met, Mother hid her mouth behind the fan and smiled like a young girl.

“Then let’s take that young lady for ourselves.”

Mother said it as casually as though she were saying, “Please wrap this item up for me.”

Wait, wait, wait.

What did she mean, take?

“M-Moth—”

The ending of the word I had been trying to say was drowned out by Crown Prince Arios’s grand proclamation.

“I cannot possibly take someone as ugly in heart as you as my wife! Here and now, I dissolve our engagement!”

He declared it loudly and proudly, puffing out his chest.

Yikes… He really had done it now.

The cathedral fell deathly silent, filled with stunned quiet and pity for King Norris for having such a son.

“To begin with—”

Crown Prince Arios crushed a laugh in the back of his throat.

No, you really need to shut up now.

Was there no attendant with him? Wouldn’t it be better for someone to drag him out even if they had to punch him?

“A person with looks like yours being my fiancée…”

He spat the words out.

And then, with a start— for the first time, it seemed to me that the white veil trembled.

Even if he was a crown prince from another land, that remark could not be overlooked.

It set me off.

What kind of man insults a woman’s appearance in public?

“Retract that statement.”

Before I knew it, I was already on my feet, saying it to Crown Prince Arios.