Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 2741: Corey, Princess Of Scots (Part II)

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Kingdom of Scotland, Lothian, Edinburgh, Palace of Holyroodhouse

I was born with everything most people spend their lives chasing.

Health.

Wealth.

Beauty.

Intellect.

Talent.

All of it was placed in my cradle before I ever learned to stand. In exchange, I lost something far more valuable, my Freedom.

My name is Corey, Princess of Scots.

By birth alone, I won the grandest lottery imaginable. A royal lineage. A gilded palace. A future written before I could form words.

They say that on the night I was born, the northern lights flooded the skies of Scots and lingered there for three months, as though nature itself had bent to acknowledge the arrival of a divine blessing, the god’s reward to the royal house that had long served god and kingdom with piety and order.

By the age of two, I could speak in full sentences. By three, I was reading and writing fluently. Whispers began spreading through court and city alike. Some called me blessed. Others called me chosen. Soon, the word "daughter of god" followed me wherever I went. I learned quickly that talent and royalty does not guarantee privacy.

No matter what I did, eyes followed. Praises poured in thick and suffocating. Adoration clung like perfume—sweet at first, then nauseating. I could not escape the staring. The bowing. The hunger in their gazes. They looked at me as though I were a miracle.

By the age of four, I awakened my Chevalier: Dice. Not the one where you roll, but the one where you cut. It happened when my uncle invited me to his manor.

The visit was supposed to be routine—family courtesy, polite smiles, servants bowing in every corridor. I remember the polished floors. The heavy curtains. The way the doors closed behind us with a final, deliberate sound. But when we were alone, his smile changed. I did not fully understand what he intended until I did.

Then, it happened, the world felt too soft and fragile. Like just by breathing I could cut it, before I knew my uncle fell to the floor as several small cubes. Then his wife, the knights, the guards, the staff, I kept dicing until my pulse stopped hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.

After that day, no one looked at me with blind adoration. They looked at me with fear. It was better that way.

No one asked what had happened behind closed doors. No one asked why a four-year-old princess would slaughter an entire household. They only cared about what I had done. Who I had killed. What it meant for the kingdom.

I stood there, small and spotless in a fancy dress, and watched them debate my morality like scholars dissecting a specimen. The only person on my side was my mother.

They wanted remorse. They wanted tears. They wanted guilt. I felt none.

With one exception though, I thought that it was bad that my aunt died too. She used to bring me sugared almonds and honeyed cakes whenever she visited the palace. Sometimes she would press extra sweets into my hands and whisper, "Don’t tell the cooks."

My mother likes to say her sister-in-law paid for her brother’s sins. I couldn’t care less. At this point the world felt boring and fragile for me, because I couldn’t even play with it to my heart’s content without destroying it.

When I turned five, my mother died.

It happened six months after she gave birth to James, my younger brother. At first, the court physicians said it was exhaustion. Then they said it was an infection. Then they stopped offering explanations altogether. She grew paler by the week, her laughter thinning into coughs, her warmth fading even while the palace remained heated.

I remember the day she stopped breathing. The silence in the room felt heavier than mourning. My father was there.

For a man who rarely displayed emotion—at least not that I could remember—he broke that day. He knelt beside her bed and wept openly, shoulders shaking, voice cracking. He cried louder than James, who was still small enough to fit in a nursemaid’s arms. I know because I stood there and compared the two sounds.

One was helpless. The other was shattered. But grief, I learned, has a short half-life in a palace.

Within a week, my father had summoned my mother’s personal maids to his chambers. One by one, then in groups. Not long after, discussions began regarding alliances, remarriage, and political consolidation through new brides and concubines.

The court called it a necessity. I called it speed. Whatever love he had for my mother burned intensely—but it burned fast. And once it was ash, the machinery of the throne resumed its rhythm as though nothing sacred had ever occupied that bed.

Before she died, my mother told me not to hate my brother for her leaving us. I nodded. I never intended to anyway. The little boy was too adorable to resent. Then she made me promise to take care of him in her absence. I promised like an idiot after all she was always on my beloved mother.

If I had known then what I know now—that this promise would cost me my freedom—I might have sent her on her way a few seconds earlier myself.

What? She was going to die regardless. And the prince had the entire Kingdom of Scots to care for him. Instead, at the age of five, I became my younger brother’s nanny. And that was when I began, slowly, to hate him.

At seventeen, during one of James’s hunting trips, I encountered a witch deep in the forest beyond the royal grounds. She was not the theatrical kind from children’s tales, but something older and thinner, with eyes that watched more than they blinked. She aimed for my brother. I killed her before she could finish whatever spell she had begun.

With her last breath, she cursed me. She told me how I would die. Just like Mother, she said. After giving birth to my second child.