Chapter 373: All-Expenses-Paid Vacation

Joseph’s first days at the palace were far from pleasant.

The absence of his personal guard and entourage forced him to depend completely on Mark’s hospitality, something that already made him uncomfortable.

And being surrounded at all hours by non-humans didn’t do much to calm his nerves either.

Bayle, in particular, kept unsettling him.

His manner was always impeccably courteous, but all it took was one look at him for Joseph to remember the immense creature he had turned into and feel his legs tremble a little.

Yet as the days went by, Joseph’s initial discomfort gave way to something he never would have expected to feel there: tranquility.

He realized it almost a week after his arrival.

He was sitting on one of the palace balconies, a glass of wine between his fingers, watching the capital slowly light up as evening fell.

He couldn’t remember the last time he had been able to stop without feeling he was wasting time.

Then he understood.

For the first time since the crusade began, he had nothing that needed solving immediately.

His entourage had been on its way to Eldia for days and could take care of passing on his orders.

The alliance with Mark was already settled and, with it, his kingdom’s survival no longer depended solely on his own decisions.

He had secured the support of one of the most powerful rulers on the continent.

One who, moreover, had a dragon under his command.

He still couldn’t decide what was more absurd: that Bayle was truly a dragon, or that Mark only used him as a butler.

Realizing how absurd the whole situation was, Joseph burst out laughing so loudly that anyone who saw him would have thought he had gone mad.

Perhaps, in part, it was true.

In his entire life he couldn’t remember having a single completely free day, so he decided that, if he was going to be stuck there a few more days anyway, he might as well make the most of it.

He began waking up late and touring the city by carriage with no particular destination, simply observing the markets, the infrastructure, and the way of life of the non-humans.

He also discovered the palace’s hot baths, fed by mana stones that kept the water at the perfect temperature, and ended up spending many more hours there than he would be willing to admit.

One afternoon, while floating in the baths and letting the hot water loosen his muscles, Joseph ended up joking with himself about the idea of turning Eldia into a vassal state of the south.

At first it was only that.

A joke.

But the more he thought about it, the less absurd it seemed.

Because, if he had to lose part of his independence, he preferred to hand it over to someone capable of governing rather than end up in the hands of fanatics who dressed up their atrocities in words about faith and divine will.

Mark had taken a territory that had spent centuries bleeding in wars between races and, in a short time, turned it into a power.

The cardinals of the Church and the Inquisition had spent generations burning people in public squares and, apparently, their greatest achievement had been making sure there was always someone else left to burn.

Of course, Joseph had no intention of surrendering Eldia while any way of preserving its sovereignty still existed.

No emperor before him had bent the knee to another empire, and he had no intention of being the first.

But if someday the crusade forced him to choose between the south and the Church, he knew perfectly well which option would be less distasteful.

He only hoped it would never come to that.

Although, to be fair, Joseph hadn’t spent his whole stay lazing around and imagining hypothetical scenarios.

During those days he had tried to approach two women whose presence there was too important to ignore.

Elyndra Ashford, the Knight of Dawn, and Alice, the Grand Inquisitor.

For years, both had held positions of enormous influence within the Church and the Inquisition, until they suddenly disappeared without any explanation.

Their absence had given rise to all kinds of rumors in the human kingdoms: death, desertion, betrayal, kidnapping, and even far more absurd stories involving the Demon Lord.

Joseph had hoped to find an answer by seeing them with his own eyes.

Instead, he discovered something even more scandalous.

Both lived in Mark’s palace, served under his orders, and were his wives.

Naturally, Joseph wanted to know how they had ended up there.

The problem was that neither of them seemed to have the slightest interest in telling him.

With Ely he tried a couple of times in the corridors.

The first time, he asked her with all the courtesy in the world what she thought of life in the south, and she merely answered that it was fine.

The second time he mentioned in passing how much she was missed in the Church, and Ely shot him a look that made it perfectly clear he was sticking his nose where it didn’t belong.

Alice proved even more unreachable.

Joseph found her one morning in the library and spent almost half an hour trying to steer the conversation toward the Inquisition, old loyalties, and the circumstances that could lead someone to switch sides.

She didn’t react.

She kept reading until she finished the page, closed the book, and left without bothering to answer.

Joseph was used to his presence altering a room.

He had never experienced anything so disconcerting as someone deciding that he simply wasn’t worth paying attention to.

With no answers from either of them, Joseph ended up doing what he did best when he lacked information: formulating theories.

The most absurd one occurred to him one night as he tossed in bed.

Mark was a necromancer. Probably the most powerful one he had ever heard of.

So the idea appeared on its own.

What if Ely and Alice hadn’t deserted?

What if they had really died, and Mark had simply brought them back?

For a few minutes, the possibility seemed unsettlingly reasonable.

Then he remembered what the undead he had seen in the past were like.

Skeletons barely held together by magic, corpses dragging their feet, and creatures that smelled of damp earth and death.

Ely and Alice had absolutely nothing to do with that.

They ate, talked, and moved with complete normality. If anything, both were somewhat pale, but that wasn’t strange in such a cold region either, and half the palace had a similar skin tone.

So that theory collapsed under its own weight.

There had to be another explanation.

And on the morning of the ninth day, as he finished breakfast in his room with his gaze lost out the window, Joseph was still turning the matter over.

"Maybe the best thing would be to ask him directly..." Joseph murmured to himself, setting the cup on its saucer. "The worst that could happen is that he doesn’t want to talk about it."

But then a knock at the door interrupted his thoughts.

"Come in."

The door opened and one of the palace maids walked into the room.

She was a beastwoman, with a pair of feline ears poking out of her chestnut hair and a slender tail swaying gently behind her as she walked.

She approached the table, picked up the tray with quick movements, and, just before leaving, gave Joseph a small smile accompanied by a wink.

Joseph followed her figure with his eyes as she left the room.

And though he would have loved to say that his stay there hadn’t changed the way he thought.

That he still saw the non-humans with the same eyes as when he arrived, and that all his convictions remained exactly where they were.

The truth was that his footing had shifted a little.

He still didn’t appreciate them much and continued to believe humanity stood far above the other races when it came to civilization.

But after so many days surrounded by absurdly attractive non-human women...

Well.

There was one thing he could no longer keep denying.

And that was that he now understood Mark a little better.

At first, Joseph hadn’t been able to understand how Mark, with all the power in the world at his disposal, could choose to marry non-humans, and even have children with them without showing the slightest reservation.

He had always assumed it was some eccentricity of Mark’s or, simply, further proof that the Death Emperor didn’t think like a normal person.

But as he watched the enormous backside of that non-human maid sway, Joseph began to suspect he had been looking for an overly complicated explanation for something quite simple.

He cleared his throat and quickly turned his gaze back to the window.

The maid, who had already reached the threshold with the tray in her hands, seemed to remember something before leaving.

"Oh, by the way, Your Majesty. The emperor asked me to remind you to have your things ready. It’s likely you’ll be departing in the next few days."

"Oh, right...," Joseph put a hand to his forehead. "With so much on my mind, I had completely forgotten. Today is the big day, isn’t it?"