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

Professor Cordevan has a scar that crosses his neck from side to side, and a voice that sounds as though someone had repaired it halfway. He teaches Politics and Diplomacy. He never sits down.

"State wedding," he said, writing it on the board. "Let no one confuse this with a marriage. A marriage is made by two people. A state wedding is made by two houses, and the people are there to sign."

Layda sat two rows ahead of me. I had my good notebook, as I’d been told.

"When two great houses unite their seals, their vassals are redistributed. The Elcronnes, for instance"—he said, without looking at me, and I’ll thank him for that until the day I die—"would go from serving D’Tariel to serving the united house. The same as House Vane. The same as twenty-odd houses you’ve never heard of. A seal doesn’t unite two families: it reorders a continent."

"And can it be undone?" asked a girl from Analazze.

"No."

He waited for someone to laugh. Nobody laughed.

"I’ll explain it slowly, because every two years there’s a student in this room who falls in love with someone they shouldn’t, and needs to hear it." Cordevan lifted his chin, and the scar made an odd fold. "Canceling a state wedding once the seals have been presented is not a scandal. It is not a disgrace. It is not a fine your house pays. It is a sin greater than death, and that expression is a technical one: it means the sentence does not end when you die. The Blind God of the Scale doesn’t close the account. He passes it on to your house, and to the children of your house, and to the children of those."

Someone from House Vane wrote down sin greater than death and underlined it twice.

"So, no. It cannot be undone."

And then, because he’s a good teacher and good teachers don’t know how to keep quiet, he added the thing I had gone there looking for without knowing I was looking for it.

"What can be done is impugn the seal."

I wrote so fast I snapped the tip.

"To impugn means to bring the seal before the Three and prove that the pact it guarantees has already been broken by the other party. The wedding isn’t annulled: the ground is pulled out from under it." He raised three fingers. "And three things are needed. All three. Miss one, and you’re a blasphemous corpse."

I looked at the back of Layda’s neck. Layda didn’t move, which, coming from her, was a scream.

"First: proof. Not a rumor, not a testimony, not a letter from your aunt. Documentary proof that the other house violated the treaty the seal guarantees."

Valah, I thought. The Treaty of Ashes forbids Empero and weapons in civilian zones, and Jahke brought Knights into Valah, and the whole continent knows it, and no one has ever taken it anywhere.

"Second: the consent of the house that bears the seal. The aggrieved house has to want to impugn it. If the king of the north doesn’t sign, there is no impugnment, even if you bring proof written by the Seraph himself."

Zaleador. Who cannot consent without igniting a war.

"And third." Cordevan lowered two fingers and left one up. "An invoker with the right of blood. Someone who carries the seal in his own flesh and is willing to speak before the Three. A bearer." He ran a hand over his scar, distracted. "And this is where all your good ideas come to die, young ones. Proof can be bought. Consent can be negotiated. Blood cannot. Blood belongs to whoever has it."

I raised my hand before deciding to raise it.

"And what if the bearer is wrong?"

"Explain yourself."

"If he speaks, and presents the proof, and the proof isn’t enough."

Cordevan looked at me for a moment longer than I would have liked.

"Then he has falsely accused a royal house before the Three Gods," he said. "And in that case, the Judgment turns on him." He straightened up. "I’m telling you this in case anyone was doing the math: this is not a play with two outcomes. It has three. Winning, losing, and a third one people forget to count."

The bell rang.

"For Friday: two pages on why the Treaty of Ashes failed. And nobody write ’because of greed.’ I hate that word."

⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽ ☆ ☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅

Layda caught up with me in the corridor and walked at my side at the exact distance at which people who don’t know each other walk.

"One," she said, looking straight ahead.

"Proof. Valah."

"It’s sealed by the Council, but it’s there. Two."

"The consent. Her father."

"Your princess has a father who didn’t want this wedding," she said, turning her head half a finger’s width. "You brought that back from the north, and you hadn’t told me."

"I’ve just told you."

"Within the deadline. Accepted." She looked straight ahead again. "Three."

And there, neither of us said anything for a good while.

Because the Elcronne Seal of Blood exists, and a man has carried it on his arm for twenty-four years, and that man had looked at me on Saturday from the other side of a door the way you look at a son who has just disappointed you.

"Your father," said Layda.

"My father."

"And what are the odds that a sworn guard will stand up in a cathedral and impugn the seal of his own king?"

I laughed. It came out wrong.

"None," I said. "Absolutely none. My father hasn’t been late to a single thing in twenty-four years."

"Then we need another bearer."

"There is no other. One seal per house, and the head of the house carries it. Cordevan just said so."

Layda stopped dead in the middle of the corridor, and the eight people coming up behind us had to go around us, and she didn’t move.

"Cordevan said the head of the house," she said, very slowly, staring into space. "Did he say that today, or did you?"

"It’s the same thing."

"It isn’t." She turned toward me. "Elcronne. Tonight. Library. Bring everything you know about your own house."

And I went off to Botany without saying anything else, because I had just realized something shameful: that I knew almost nothing about my own house, and that in three months it had never occurred to me to ask.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!