The doors to her chambers were magnificent, more impressive than the book had ever managed to describe them.
Inside, Menel welcomed him gently and offered him a seat to rest his legs. Ran refused the seat and tried to jump straight to the point.
Menel repeated herself, and this time it was an order. "Sit."
Flustered by the sudden change in her tone, Ran apologized for his rudeness and sat down beside her.
Menel laughed it off pleasantly and excused his rough manners, remarking that he had always been the impatient type.
Then her voice changed again.
"When did you become a completely different person? Someone bold enough to venture into the imperial forest alone."
This was exactly why he had been avoiding her.
Normally, manis manifested as abilities related to nature. The emperor wielded fire manis. Rasia wielded water. Menel's ability was unlike any other, and in a certain sense it stood above all of them, because her manis was human.
She could read minds, and she could manipulate them. It was considered a terrifying power, and everyone in the palace was correct to consider it so.
She was using it on him now, urging him to come clean, warning him mildly that she might be offended if she discovered he had lied.
Ran kept calm and reminded himself of what he knew: her ability did not work on him, and she almost certainly knew that already. All of this theatre was meant to intimidate him into confessing on his own, on the assumption that he did not know the truth about her failure.
Besides, there were two conditions under which Menel's ability failed to activate. The first was that the person had to be related to her by blood. The second was that the target had to genuinely love her.
Ran met the first condition already. As for the second, he was quite certain that he had no emotional attachment to this woman whatsoever, so there was no way the ability would take hold of him even without that initial block.
Like a classic psychopath, Menel gently urged him again to answer her question. Ran was too busy wondering why her power did not touch him to produce anything at all.
Realizing that he had no intention of answering, Menel decided to employ another method, and called for the imperial knights standing outside her door.
Two of them stepped into the room, and she ordered them to make the seventh prince talk, since he refused to do it willingly.
"Slit his mouth," she said.
The knights reminded her fearfully that she was ordering them to injure the seventh prince, and that servants like themselves could never find the guts to lay hands on royalty. They fell to their knees and told her that they could not obey such a command, and urged her to reconsider.
Menel used her power on them.
In no time at all the two men reached for their swords and pointed them at Ran.
"Choose your words very carefully," Menel said.
"My mother has died," Ran said.
That shocked her. She asked what he was talking about, and why he would think that such a thing had happened, and whether he had been in contact with his mother.
"It isn't what you think," Ran said. "Before she left, she gave me one thing. A necklace, with a blue gemstone in the centre. She told me that as long as the blue light didn't fade, we would be able to meet again."
He let a silence sit in the room.
"A while ago the light began to fade. Then the stone turned black, and it shattered. After I finished panicking, a thought came to me. That the mother I have longed for my entire life had finally been laid to rest in her homeland, in the east."
Every word of it was a lie.
Among the many mistresses who had borne children for the emperor, Ran's mother was the only one ever to escape the imperial family. The reason she fled had never been revealed anywhere in the novel, though it was presumed that she had returned to her hometown in the east. There were rumours that she ran because she had given birth to a black-haired prince. Whatever the truth, she never appeared again, not once, all the way to the final page.
Menel expressed her surprise. She had always thought that Ran resented his mother.
"I did, when I was young," Ran said, "because she left me. Later I understood that the reason I was always gazing at the eastern sky, and taking out the necklace she gave me every night, was that I missed her."
He drew the necklace out from inside his shirt.
Menel asked whether this had changed his mind about the relatives he still had.
"It's funny," Ran said calmly. "I never thought a lifetime of resentment could turn into longing in a single moment." He laid the necklace on the table between them. "Maybe that's what family is."
Menel took a moment to digest everything she had just heard.
Then she told the knights to sheathe their swords. She ordered them outside, and used her power to wipe everything that had happened in that room from their memories.
Ran stood there wondering whether his lie had come through, and then Menel walked up to him to comfort him, and he knew that it had.
She assured him that he had nothing at all to worry about, because even if he was a failure, he was still her younger brother.
Ran stood in her chambers wondering whether she was messing with him. What he did understand was that she would grow suspicious sooner or later, now that the power which let her manipulate anyone she pleased had simply stopped working on one person.
And Menel had never been on his side to begin with. He had never been on hers.
Still, his lie had worked and he had survived to see another day, which was all he asked of any given afternoon. The necklace, for the record, was a cheap accessory he had found lying around his rooms.
Then it dawned on him that he had no idea what had actually happened to Agoni.
In the original story, the old knight fell into the valley and lost his legs. This time around, Ran could only wonder whether he had managed to meet the protagonist down there, because he could not think of a single version of events in which Agoni Feitus simply died.