The Royal Banquet #6
A story, was it? Fine by me.
Duke Kilinaire left those words hanging and strode out of the banquet hall ahead of us.
He had picked a fight only to come away empty-handed, so of course he was seething. More than that, he seemed to have taken Helena’s suggestion that they settle the matter once and for all to heart.
Helena and I followed at his back, making our way to his chambers.
The original culprit, Agnes, was left out of it. Even if she had been brought into the room now, it would have done no good… so it was the right call.
“Tsk. Sit, for now. I find it distasteful to offer a seat meant for people to a beast… but leaving you standing is even more unpleasant.”
The Duke offered the chair in a tone that made it clear he would rather do almost anything else. The thorns in his voice and the vivid contortion of his face proved as much.
Helena, however, sat across from him as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Even if he hadn’t offered a seat, I suspected she would simply have pulled a chair out and sat down anyway. There was that kind of unhesitating quality to the way she moved.
“To cause this entire uproar over nothing more than some insignificant viscount’s whelp… truly, it is beyond—”
“Shut your mouth. The next time a single word that demeans Zion leaves your lips, your head will roll across this floor.”
Helena leveled a sharp glare at the Duke, letting a quiet killing intent bleed into the air. The Duke, who had only ever trained in the gentlemanly exercise and swordsmanship common among ordinary nobles, shuddered violently under the weight of it. He managed to stay upright, but the fear was plain to see.
“Beast of a woman.”
He must have realized it himself; all he did was click his tongue lightly. Watching him let the insult pass without any real rebuttal only confirmed the impression.
“…Very well. Let us get to the point. You said you would challenge me to a territorial war. What do you intend to do if I refuse?”
“I’ll leave what happens next to your imagination.”
An utterly sinister smile curved Helena’s lips. It was the face of someone who would not back down even if the proposal were rejected.
The Duke must have understood that as well. He swallowed dryly. The arrogance remained, but a note of retreat had crept into his bearing.
“You do understand that a territorial war would inflict catastrophic losses on both sides?”
“And so? Do you think I declared war to haggle over profit and loss? This is a matter of pride.”
Her pride, of course, was me. From where I sat listening, the words were almost painfully embarrassing. That I could still feel a flutter of happiness in the middle of a situation this serious made me wonder if a few screws had come loose. She was that unshakable.
And when she brought up pride, the Duke seemed to find some measure of understanding; he gave a slow nod. As a textbook specimen of the arrogant noble, he was bound to be hypersensitive to that particular word.
“Pride, is it… Even a rabid dog is still of ducal blood, and the fact that you are a duchess does not change either. Fine. I will grant you that much.”
And so, instead of a territorial war, he proposed a duel, speaking the words with deliberate care.
“Looking at a beast like you, I see no sign you will quit until your teeth are in the prey’s throat. That said, fighting a full territorial war is still a problem. Therefore I propose we settle this the traditional way—through a duel. As befits the nobility.”
I agreed that a territorial war was far too total and large-scale. Avoiding it if possible was the wise course. From our side, the offer could not have been more welcome. In a way, it looked like the fruit of Helena’s hardline stance having worked exactly as intended.
“A duel. If you mean to decide victory and defeat that way, I have no real objection. Fine. Spell out the exact conditions.”
Helena nodded, accepting the Duke’s proposal without hesitation. So long as she got to tear him apart, she probably did not care much about the form it took.
Besides, once both parties agreed, no one could interfere with a duel; the moment the principals finished their talks, that was the end of it. Territorial wars operated on a similar principle—though notarization was another matter entirely.
“Very well. The duel will consist of three matches. Whichever side claims the greater number of victories wins. Any objection?”
“I will take part in those three matches without fail.”
“That was the plan. You are a beast who will only be satisfied when you sink your own teeth into the opponent’s throat, so of course you will be included.”
Three matches in total was a curious choice. It was not as if rock-paper-scissors needed a best-of-three, yet here we were with a best-of-three duel.
Still… it made a certain amount of sense. Even if Helena lost her bout, he only needed to take the other two. It was a calculated proposal designed to offset the burden of facing her while improving his overall odds.
But the Duke’s conditions did not stop there.
“However, you will face one hundred Sword Experts at once. That is a condition. Furthermore, you are not allowed to kill them.”
The moment I heard those words, my eyes narrowed. Facing a hundred Experts was not especially difficult for her—but subduing them without killing was another matter entirely.
Experts might be weak compared to a Master, yet they could still draw an Aura Blade. That meant they could blunt Helena’s edge, if only for a fraction of a second, and the more of them there were, the higher the chance her blade would be stalled. If they used those openings to try to neutralize her… the fight would become extremely ugly.
Because she was a Sword Master whose reputation far outstripped any precise measure of her strength, a hundred Experts must have looked like enough on paper. Even I, who had watched her swing a sword more often than anyone, had never once seen her true bottom. That alone said enough.
From that angle, the Duke had probably decided that even a Master’s floor was not all that deep. Otherwise he would never have named so concrete a number as one hundred Experts. Or perhaps, as I had thought earlier, he simply intended to concede one match and win the other two.
“Understood. I accept.”
Helena accepted the proposal without a second’s hesitation, of course. The Duke had offered it because he believed it was a fight he could win—but for Helena it was equally welcome. Whatever the reason, the man himself had stepped forward to settle the matter; that alone was something to be grateful for.
“Then the conditions of the duel are set. The remaining two matches will be ordinary one-on-one duels. You may choose your own champions; I will do the same.”
“Next, state the terms you will demand of the loser.”
“Terms… terms, is it…”
Once the gauntlet had been thrown, the Duke clearly had no intention of letting the matter end cleanly. He must already have finished deciding what he would extract as the price of victory while he was thinking about the duel itself. The leisurely way he stroked his chin seemed to say as much.
A silence so complete it felt oppressive filled the room for a short while.
At last the Duke lowered the hand from his chin, twisted the corner of his mouth upward, and spoke.
“Heh heh! If I win, Helena Krauser—I will make you a slave of my house. Naturally I will also employ the magic used to command slaves. With Krauser blood, having you bear Kilinaire children would be excellent; fully exploiting your abilities as a Sword Master would be excellent as well.”
The thoroughly vile smile was irritating enough, but the condition itself—treating Helena as nothing more than a tool—was worse. In practice he might well treat her as lower than a household pet.
Helena, however, simply nodded as if none of it touched her. No—she actually gave a short, dry laugh, as though the terms suited her just fine, and parted her lips.
“Fine. My father is still in good health, so even if I lose, the Krauser line will not end. Then I suppose it is my turn to name conditions…?”
“Yes, yes. Go on. What terms do you intend to set?”
“First, as I said at the beginning: Agnes Kilinaire’s head. Second, you will surrender the ducal title and every last scrap of your fortune, and you will be confined to a monastery until the day your breath stops. Third, the appointment of the next Duke of Kilinaire will be mine. Of course I will not choose some complete outsider; I will select from among your own family. Ah—and being locked in a monastery means a total ban on political activity. You understand that much, I trust?”
Albus Kilinaire’s conditions had been thoroughly filthy, yet Helena’s did not look any lighter. Demanding the current Duke’s deposition and seizing the right to name his successor was, in effect, declaring she would hold the entire Kilinaire house in her grip and shake it.
If that had not been the case… the fire that kindled in the Duke’s eyes would never have appeared.
“You damned woman… you mean to set three conditions?”
“Agnes’s punishment is only natural, so it is effectively two. And even those two are lighter than treating me as your personal slave, are they not? Well? Will you accept?”
The Helena of this moment would probably have preferred to take Albus Kilinaire’s head rather than merely lock him away. But she had judged that doing so would make a man who had finally agreed to negotiate bolt for the door. So she had asked me to let her vent her rage in another direction instead of beheading him. The result, it seemed, was this compromise: dethronement rather than death.
“Accept, is it… Fine! I accept!”
The Duke ground his teeth and snarled like a cornered animal. The presence he had built up over a lifetime as a human being was fairly intimidating.
Helena, however, felt no threat at all; she merely snorted and nodded. The moment the other party accepted the duel, she already had more than half the victory in hand, so of course she looked pleased.
“The date will be one month from now. We will request His Majesty’s notarization. There is no other authority in the realm fit to notarize a duel between dukes.”
The Duke slammed the table with a violent crack and raised his voice. The month’s grace was almost certainly the time he needed to secure Sword Experts of sufficient caliber and the fighters who would win the other two matches. In other words, we would have to sit and watch him gather strength with our hands folded—yet Helena accepted even that.
At the time I did not understand why she so readily agreed to every one of the Duke’s proposals. Later, when I heard the reason from her own lips, I could only nod. She had wanted to thoroughly grind the face of a Duke who had gathered all his power and was swaggering in triumph. It was a reason that made a certain kind of sense.
“Ha… haha… Good heavens. A duel. A duel!”
King Elvin Sother could not hide his bewilderment at the untimely request for notarization. That the parties involved were two dukes made the whole affair even more awkward to discuss.
In his heart he would have preferred to stop them—there was nothing to gain—yet the murderous pressure rolling off both sides forced him to agree, quietly, to serve as notary. The central government was not without power, but the instinctive fear those two inspired was a separate matter entirely.
“Duchess Krauser. Why, exactly, have you suddenly entered into a duel with Duke Kilinaire?”
After the principals and the notary had finished the contract, the king summoned Helena alone for a private audience. He had heard the outline of events, yet still found it difficult to accept.
“Your Majesty, that is…”
Helena answered with a measure of honesty. Even if the other party had not known, he had defiled her fiancé, and this was the vengeance that followed.
But that alone would not be easy for the king to welcome. After several days had cooled her blood, Helena realized as much and began to add the honeyed words she had never originally planned to say. Since House Krauser belonged to the royalist faction, she expected the argument to land with greater force.
“In addition, it is also to weaken the power of Kilinaire, head of the noble faction.”
“To weaken Kilinaire…?”
By age and by station, Elvin Sother was a man who could freely use casual speech. Yet he respected Helena—and House Krauser—so he always elevated his language even in private.
“Yes. As Your Majesty knows, the noble faction’s purpose is to expand noble influence still further, and to that end they continue to nibble away at the strength of the royalist faction, Your Majesty included.”
“That much I know. I am well aware, in particular, of how greedy the nobles under Duke Kilinaire are. They are a genuine headache.”
“Indeed. It may not be my place to say this before Your Majesty, the master of the realm… but I believe the proper balance is one in which our royalist faction is only slightly stronger. Yet they crossed the line first, and they continue to cross it even now. Therefore we must apply a drastic remedy of our own.”
A drastic remedy.
The king seemed thoroughly pleased with the phrase; he nodded and drew a faint, curved smile.
“And that is why you accepted such reckless conditions?”
“They were the ones who first set reckless conditions. In any case, that gave me the freedom to act aggressively in turn. And if I win the duel, House Kilinaire will inevitably be weakened still further.”
“I see. If Your Grace holds the right to name the successor, there will be any number of ways to use that leverage against them.”
It might look minor on the surface, but seizing the power of appointment was an enormous threat. And the more ruthless the person holding that power, the more easily they could slice the opponent’s strength in half.
The king understood that well enough to feel a chill run down his spine—yet at the same time he found it deeply satisfying.
Of course he could not claim there were no lingering risks at all. Moreover, he was merely the notary; he had no right to stop them. If things ever went sour, they might well go looking for another duke of equal standing.
In the end, however, he concluded that he had no choice but to trust her. The other party was the head of House Krauser, famed for its loyalty—and a Sword Master besides.
A Master was a formidable threat by that fact alone; but once such a person became a reliable ally, there was nothing more reassuring in the world. Therefore he judged it best to accommodate her as far as possible.