Friends Who Became Villainesses

By Henry Cobb

Chapter Eleven: Betrayal of The Saint

Princess Amesombra maintained a calm and pleasant demeanor as she sat in her tearoom and listened to my report of my stay at Baron Thornblend's estate. Only a slight tremble of her fingers and a tiny narrowing of her eyes whenever she looked at me hinted at the volcano of hatred building inside her which my White Magic senses told me of.

I risked glancing at the two who sat beside me, and they each seemed to sense this in their own way. Synthia's posture started to tense up just a tiny bit, as if to strike like a snake at Her Highness' orders while Benci lost all the color in her cheeks and started to tremble a bit herself.

When I finished Amesombra said, "Thank you, Miss Pureheart, that was very helpful." Then she turned to Benci (who tried to scoot even further back in her seat), "Miss Chiskei, you look exhausted from your trip. Why don't you go with Synthia, and she can get you settled in. And Synthia, now that Miss Pureheart has revealed Miss Chiskei's nature, her safety is a matter of grave importance to the security of this nation. May I impose on you the duty of keeping her safely beside yourself and training her in your very particular set of skills?"

"Your Highness, I will provide a bed for her in my room and train her as my understudy, in all matters."

"Excellent. Now please be off with the two of you so that I can have a few words with Miss Pureheart."

I waited until the door had closed behind them then said. "Amy, please tell me, what did I do wrong?"

"As I said, Miss Pureheart. You have been very helpful to me today." Her face warped into a smile of pure hatred and contempt. "For you have revealed to me the traitor to our cause that I have been willfully blind to. If before last week I had written down a list of names of the people in this world least likely to betray me then one name would stand out, perhaps not at the top, but surely within the top four. And yet, here we are."

"Who, who might that be, Your Highness?"

"If that is not instantly obvious then perhaps you are just a blithering useful idiot working for them rather than a fervent member of The Cult. Pity that White Magic has no cure for stupidity. If you have a few minutes more then I shall go over the list of misdeeds in your betrayal of my foolishly misplaced trust in you. Miss Chiskei was no threat to either of us until you picked her and announced her White Magic abilities. Now that you have provided The Cult with a replacement faux saint they don't need to keep you alive anymore. They may try to put her forward as their figurehead, but she would wither against the darkness and every man, woman, and child in this kingdom will die for your foolishness."

"I didn't think of that."

"You claim that you don't think, and I'll just accept that for the moment. Item number two is when you threw away the only reason for your trip on day one and made no attempt at all to fish for another man more suited to your tastes. Of all of your misdeeds, this one hurts me the most. I made it very clear to you what was absolutely vital to completing your mission and you gave no weight at all to my words. What exactly is it that you have against my life and your own?"

"Your Highness has said that I require an extraordinarily strong bond with my partner, and I have felt no such pull on my heart from any man."

"Fine. We can work around your stupidity and laziness on this one point. I shall have my three friends start a whispering campaign against me to set speed dates for us two. Even if you don't find a fiancée in this then maybe I will. Item number three is how you spent the entire month telling the entire world that you were The Saint reborn."

"No, Your Highness. Every day I told many people that I wasn't The Saint."

"And all of these people looked past the false modesty of your words to your deeds that convinced them otherwise. Over the past week, stacks of letters from nobles across our realm arrived for all members of my family asking if they could bring their family members to be healed by The Saint. In one month you have thrown away all of my hard work over the past six years trying to convince my family that this new Amesombra was a diligent, dependable, and trustworthy princess."

"I did not consider the relationship of Your Highness with the rest of the royal family."

"You never have. If only I could talk him into it, I would have you assigned as my brother's personal maid with the hope that he would indulge himself and then be honest about what he had done afterward. Speaking of personal weaknesses brings us to the fourth point, which is under my control, not yours. I will now spell out for you a secret of my nature that I foolishly thought I had made clear at our first meeting. Princess Amesombra's greatest weakness in the game is that she is a total sadist, and the pleasure she gets from inflicting pain, especially on Angelica, leads directly to her downfall in most playthroughs."

Amesombra bowed her head and closed her eyes as she leaned her forehead against her fingers, then she straightened and looked me directly in the eyes as she continued. "My biggest headache at this moment is that spoiled little princess jumping up and down in the back of my head telling me that I can spit on you, spank you, cut you with a knife, whip you, and beat you with a stick and all of this will just be practice for your healing factor. That you would receive some sick pleasure of your own from this treatment and that you would come bleating back to me happily unscathed the next day to do it all over again. As a rational adult, I am well aware that none of this would be helpful to my plans and the survival of those I hold dear, which strangely enough still includes yourself. My three friends all claim that they are all the same people fitting seamlessly into a second life, but Amesombra was always a vicarious pleasure for me, and I admit to some discomfort fitting into her skin. If this beast is a part of my true self that I kept hidden from myself in my past life then I will not feed it here. I shall starve the beast to the best of my ability, but the next time you start to do something so very stupid I beg you to first think of this beast that is always there, ready to claw at my soul."

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"Your Highness, I'm so sorry. I will accept any punishment you decree."

"Please do not now or ever lead me into temptation, Angie. For I can find my own way."

"I'm sorry -- Amy. I pledge to love, honor, and obey you in all things."

"Now wouldn't that be an interesting path? Of course, half the fanfics for the game blow off the entire Demon Lord plot and skip forward to that couple in a happy ending. With a disturbing number of these including the whips. But we must face reality for what it is. The very last thing I desire from you is blind obedience to the letter of my commands. It would be vastly more helpful to have you as a friend who is cognizant of my needs and plans and reports back to me about the matters which I might need to rethink, because I do not know everything. You are in many important ways smarter than myself and as I have told you many times, your empathy is your ultimate cheat stat. Now I will go over our new plans and I want you to sit there thinking about these while I go jogging to try and keep one step ahead of the beast. In addition to the whisper campaign against myself, I shall talk Professor Hirudine into including Miss Chiskei as an assistant for her class and adding a weekend clinic which her students will get credit for. I do not believe that it would be wise to tell Miss Chiskei how much depends on her ability to train for what is to come. But should she fall even a little bit short then I shall have you wash her blood off my hands. I only promise to not inflict any pain on her should that day come, for my sake, hers, and yours."

That evening I was sent to eat with Benci, Synthia, and the other servants while Amy was summoned to a private dinner with her parents of this world.

After dinner, she said nothing but seemed even more pale than usual. Later in her bed as she pressed her nose into the back of my neck with her arms around me she said, "Angie, I need you to promise to tell me when I am hurting you. Because I don't want to be that evil princess, especially not to you."

"Amy, I promise to always speak truly to you."

"Thank you."

For the last week before our sophomore year, Amy had the Academy set aside one of the smaller halls for Professor Hirudine's clinic. The palace guards were instructed to send all supplicants looking for The Saint there. The process was much the same as at Baron Thornblend's estate, only with Professor Hirudine's returning students tending to those waiting, Hirudine assisting Amy with the examinations (with a still wary Benci providing light as needed), and with my role being to cast whatever healing spells were needed at the end.

Some of the supplicants had no physical wounds and wanted only a blessing from me, but as instructed I told them I had no such authority and they should see the priests at the temple instead. Some only wanted to leave gifts for me, and Amy personally thanked them for their contributions to the academy while I stood silently by her side.

Benci attended Amy's classes as her third attendant. And thanks to overhearing the grumbling about this blatant favoritism I was able to piece together the outlines of Amy's campaigns of whispers against herself. This was that Duke Barta's lack of an heir suggested that the current or next king would fill the position with whomever married Amy. King Orageu and Queen Bruyerine had impressed on their daughter the need for her to select a fiancee before she graduated, but she was so obsessed with her pet (i.e. me) that she paid this little attention. Therefore some baron's or even knight's son could hope to become a duke if only he had a friend who would court me.

This bait didn't take long to get a nibble as Lord Koponoy asked me on the first Thursday at school if I had any plans for Friday night. I responded that that I had planned to go with the princess to see a visiting foreign opera, but that the escorts Her Highness had thought to be available actually had other plans and that she was now in a diplomatic pickle where she would insult the other nation if she skipped the event or if she left the other two seats empty. Lord Koponoy returned five minutes later with a knight's son from his barony named Sir Torozsa and the date was on.

When our escorts arrived the princess did not seem to be offended that the knight's son was her escort or that the boys took the seats flanking me to describe to me what exactly was being sung in the foreign tongue. She even invited the boys to a dinner at the palace and we had just taken our seats at a table set up on a balcony overlooking the river when Synthia arrived to whisper something to Amy who then excused herself. Sir Torozsa seemed to want to remain for the dinner, but Lord Koponoy ordered him away.

When I returned to Amy's room she looked up from the letter she was writing and asked, "So Angie, how was your date?"

"Lord Koponoy seemed much more interested in telling me how knowledgeable and cultured he was than in getting to know what I thought about anything."

"The one good thing about the circus you presented this summer is that the boys seem a lot more interested in marrying a living saint from the slums than a cursed princess. We'll set you up to fly solo in speed dating and hence save a lot of my time. Now let's get to sleep for we have a long day ahead with your clinic."

The only part of Amy's changed plan for me that I noticed the next week was that I was now set to eat alone at the academy's dining hall for lunch each school day and whatever table I sat at was soon filled. Mostly these were boys with plenty to talk about themselves, but occasionally one of the girl students would ask about my life.

The four friends continued to shine in their classes but in different ways. Professor Hirudine's advanced class (which we two had started in last year and repeated this year) was mostly a discussion between the professor and the princess about the cases they had seen in our clinics, with Amy calling out to the alchemists in the class to find the name of a herb based on criteria such as the color of the flower or the smell of the root.

Lady Malheurfla now ran a class of her own that combined alchemy and magic. The class project for the semester had something to do with the "Electricity" and "Aluminum" fancies that Lady Depecia had invented for her stories to entertain her brother Gnouian. My part in the project was to work with three other students to wrap thin copper wires in fabric and then paint them with a tarry substance. The professors and growing number of students who attended this class seemed to humor the friends in this.

Lady Depecia was also allowed free reign to her imagination in the history class, comparing actual historical events against fables about hypothetical lands named Gaul, France, and so on.

Lady Yeuxpera ran her new class on trade like a tyrant. I vaguely grasped the concept that the concepts of Supply and Demand existed both before and after purchase but not how the charts she drew would determine the price of goods. Wasn't that what haggling was for?

Between classes, I asked about something that had been bothering me all summer. "Lady Yeuxpera, is it true that you broke Lord Vurbor's arm?"

"Yes, I did."

"Why?"

"I told my group to hold back as I used acrobatics to trick the stonekin into dropping to the floor of the cavern. Vurbor rushed forward to hack at one of the fallen stonekin before I gave the all-clear. I kicked him out of the way and then dodged the stonekin that was just about to fall on his head. Better for him to break an arm rather than a neck."