The Villainess Will Not Bring Dishonor To Her Family

134 - House Tepet's Choice - Part 2

I am still trying to get a proper understanding what is going on with Lily's death. I feel as though I have found out too much in too short time.

I knew that she was killed by someone under her command, but I did not expect that someone to be her husband or husband-to-be. I did consider that they could simply have been flirting, but in that case cheating would not have been applicable. It would just have been a loss of favor.

Going by her expression of being in deep thought, I've determined she suspects her husband, or husband-to-be of having been manipulated to kill her by the woman she had thought he slept with.

She's probably been stuck on her own view of it without mulling it over. Since she's forcefully pushed it from her memory until our argument, she probably hasn't had much time to think about it, or at least had no one to turn to in helping her understand what had happened. She'd never talk with anyone about these things. Probably only the honorable Magdalin... so why did I become the one for her to trust and talk with?

"It would make sense that he had been manipulated."

Lily breaks into my streams of thought with crossed arms. As usual her thoughtful expression makes her look irritated.

"He was never the kind to consider such methods. He was much too forward for such a method too. He was the kind to cut rather than poison."

Seeing as they'd been on the front line this made sense... but... she was poisoned?

"He may have used her as a reference of where to get the poison too which would explain how he got it and why he had to spend time with her that day."

As Lily continues in thought, my thoughts go in another direction. Lily was poisoned in her previous life... and for some reason that reminded me of that poisoning when Lily had been a kid. That would have happened around the time Lily began to change. I still remember that meeting simply because of the shock. If I don't recall wrong, Eric had been acting somewhat odd already back then... I'm pretty sure that the change happened around the time of the poisoning. Would it be odd to consider the poisoning the trigger?

I look up at her and find her blue eyes staring at directly at me. Did I miss something? Lily shifts her weight a bit and watches me with this look of suspicion in her eyes.

"Is something wrong?"

Seems like I hadn't missed anything.

"No........ still, it sounds like he must have spent a while planning to kill you if those things are true."

I end up pausing for a brief moment while Lily stares blankly at me. Had she considered it a crime of passion?

"...still, if you got to talk with him and he answered you I guess the rest of his life must've let him think a lot about his actions..."

I make an assumption here based on Lily's unexpected openness. She wasn't in as foul a mood as you'd expect from someone that just talked with their killer and someone that had betrayed them.

Lily blinks slowly a few times and then stares at me calmly.

"He lived a few hours more at most. Magic was a very rare thing in my former world. Not at all quite common as it is here. As a priest or priestess who can communicate with the gods and make them listen to your prayers, you are an incredibly valuable person. I had reached a point where I'd gotten prayers and had reached a rank as officer, a path which priests usually do not take. I was quite valuable and my lord had forbidden me for killing myself after I... lost everyone..."

She pauses there and lowers her eyes to the floor. Her hand reaches to fiddle with the pendant soothingly. I'm not sure what all of this has to do with how long he lived, but... I am happy he didn't live a long happy life after that. Lily looks down at the pendant as she continues.