Transmigrated As The Villainess' Boyfriend With A... SSS Harem System?

The abandoned greenhouse was still sealed off.

Nobody had gone in since they found Dayne Ascalar against the back wall, and the Investigators’ cordon had gone up, and a strip of cloth has never stopped anyone in the history of the world.

Layda ducked under it without so much as a glance.

"No one comes in here," she said.

"Someone died here."

"That’s exactly why no one will."

I opened my mouth to answer her. Wasn’t that precisely why it was likely someone would? After all, it was a crime scene. But in the end, Layda was far too peculiar to expect a normal course of action from her, so I decided to shut my mouth and not answer.

Inside, it smelled of damp earth and mold. The planters were still where they’d been that night, the plants inside them dead of thirst, because it never occurred to anyone in the Squadron that somebody would have to keep watering them. There’s something obscene about a greenhouse where the plants have been left to die.

Layda raised her index finger toward the ceiling and, using her Empero, whispered, so that a small light would emanate from the tip of her finger; then she sat down on an overturned crate, and I stayed standing, because Garchi had started pacing in circles along the back wall, and because I had no desire to see where he stopped.

I had brought him because he couldn’t bear going more than half a day without seeing me, and the truth is I valued his company too. The loyalty of a companion is something few things can compare to.

"We’re going to do this properly, Dariel," she said, and took out that diary of hers.

You see, there’s one thing you have to understand about Layda Alaranne: I had seen her cry in a corridor with a conviction that would have earned her an ovation in any theater of my world, and that same night I had watched her try to kill me without her pulse so much as quickening. That was the kind of person she was. Allying myself with her was the worst idea I’d ever had. But it was also the best one.

A walking contradiction, just like her.

And besides, it wasn’t as if I’d been able to come up with anything better than allying myself with her.

"A deal between the two of us is worthless," she went on. "You’re going to lie to me and I to you, and we both know it, and wasting time pretending otherwise will cost us the wedding. So we’ll put it in writing. Does that suit you, Dariel Elcronne?"

She opened the diary to a clean page. The ink spilled out of her fingers, white against the paper.

"Three things. Only three. In everything else, you can lie as much as you like and I won’t take offense."

"Say them."

"One." She wrote as she spoke. "What each of us wants when this is over. I want Ardwyn." Her eyes radiated conviction. "I’ve said it out loud and I don’t intend to blush. Now you."

"I just want Lianza not to marry someone who doesn’t truly love her."

The diary glowed for an instant, then went dark.

"Don’t come to me with half-truths, Dariel Elcronne," she said, looking up. "That’s not everything you want."

"It’s everything you need to know."

She pointed at me with her glowing finger.

"That, that’s exactly what I’ve just forbidden." She tapped the page twice with her finger. "Come on, say it again. This time, do it right."

I clenched my teeth.

"I want Lianza not to get married. And I want her to still be alive when that happens. And I want..." I hesitated for a second, but Layda knew it already anyway. "...I want her not to be parted from me."

The light didn’t move.

"Better." She wrote. "Two. Anything we know about the wedding and haven’t said. If you find something out — even if it embarrasses you, even if it makes you look bad, even if it comes from your princess — it goes on the table." She raised an eyebrow. "Anything right now?"

I thought of a sleepless king, and of the letter his daughter had sent him, thanking him. I thought of Lianza saying yes when she could have said no.

"Yes. But I can’t say it yet."

"That’s keeping quiet, which is a different sin... but we’re not regulating that one today." She smiled faintly. "It’ll do for now."

"Then it’s your turn. Is there anything you haven’t told me?"

"A great deal."

"About the wedding."

Layda stopped writing.

"Ardwyn doesn’t love her," she said. "Not the way all of you believe. He wants the north, he wants his father to look at him once in his life with something other than disappointment, and he wants to beat a kitchen boy who talked back to him at a ball. That boy is you. He’s going to marry your princess for those three things, and in that order."

"You’re only giving me your opinion. I was expecting real information."

"It is information about him, and I know him better than anyone in this world." She went back to the paper. "And I’m writing it down anyway, so you can see how it’s done."

"And the third?"

That one, she did take her time with.

"Three. The day one of us decides to break the deal, they have to say so before breaking it." She looked at me. "Not after. Before."

"Why?"

Layda smiled.

"Because I’m going to do it."

She said it with the same ease as someone telling you the time.

"When this is over, you and I will want different things, Elcronne. On that day, you’ll be in my way, and I’ll be in yours." She went back to the paper. "I’d rather give you fair warning than have you hate me by surprise. I’ve already been hated by surprise. It’s... exhausting."

"Who?"

And there, for the first time since I’d known her, Layda Alaranne made a mistake.

"Almost everyone," she said. "It’s what usually happens in the inter—"

She stopped.

It was half a second. She closed her mouth, dropped her gaze to the diary, and went on writing in the same impeccable hand as always, and if I hadn’t spent six years of my life reading novels where people give themselves away in the subordinate clause, I would have let it pass.

"In the what?"

"In the attempt. In any attempt to do something great." Not a flicker of hesitation. "Sign."

"Layda..."

"No."

"I haven’t asked anything."

"You were about to." She looked up, and the shadows cast by the small light of her finger seemed to lend her the face of a much older person. "Listen carefully, because I’m giving you this one for free, outside the deal. There are things I can’t tell you, and if I did, you’d start asking questions. Many questions. And believe me, the questions will kill you before Ardwyn does... or I do. Sign the blessed paper."

I ran my finger along the edge of the paper and, just as Layda did, let a thread of Empero out through my fingertip, and signed with it.

The diary closed on its own.

"Good." Layda stood, brushed off her skirt, and was the shy new girl again in exactly two seconds — a trick I’ve never seen anyone else pull off, and certainly not that perfectly. "Tomorrow Cordevan is teaching state weddings. Bring your good notebook."

She ducked out under the cordon without looking back.

I stayed a moment longer, because Garchi had finally sat down, and he had sat down right at the point on the wall where the mark could still be seen.

You already know that wall. I had seen it once, at night, with a corpse in front of it, and ever since I’d been avoiding this greenhouse with a discipline I was rather proud of.

I drew closer.

The mark is still there. It’s a depression, an area where the stone sank inward half a finger’s width and the seams split open in a fan, and the Council’s Investigators deemed it compatible with a physical Empero of great power — and with nothing else.

Garchi lifted his head and looked at me.

He meowed once, very softly.

"Yeah," I said. "I don’t understand it either."

I picked him up off the floor; he complained at me on principle, and we left, and I put out the remnant of luminescent Empero that Layda had left on her seat before going.

That night, as I climbed the stairs, I did the math for the first time: eighteen days.

And all I had was a piece of paper signed in Empero by two people who didn’t like each other one bit.