The Hunt #3
"Are you truly certain this is all right?"
Clink.
Chess set his steaming teacup on the table, making no effort to hide the worry etched across his face.
Is, who had been working through a modest hill of slim document folders from his seat, answered by wordlessly lifting his own cup to his lips. The tea was still excellent in both aroma and flavor—a carefully prepared blend of the finest grade.
"You're talking about Helena."
A silence settled between them that was not quite uncomfortable, yet thick with tension. Only when Is set his cup down again did he finally open his heavy mouth.
Chess merely nodded, as if the question that had read his thoughts so cleanly were the most natural thing in the world. He had served this man—former Duke of Krauser, and still the great elder of the house—for no small number of years.
"Yes. The Riesling Margraviate of all places. Isn't it dangerous to send her somewhere so perilous?"
"Have you grown so old that you've learned to crack jokes? I seem to recall Helena was in far greater danger when she fought that duel."
Is gave a dry little laugh as the memory rose unbidden. In character, in skill, in spirit—his daughter Helena had lacked for nothing. And yet that was the first time the madness she had kept so tightly sealed inside her had broken free, a pressure so crushing that even he had flinched and stepped back.
"Haah. I nearly wore a hole through my chest when I heard the news myself. I never imagined Lady Helena would hold my worthless son in such high regard…"
Chess had felt the same as Is.
On the day she had executed Cain with her own hands, Chess had believed he was simply watching the latent nature of a ruler finally surface from within Helena. A gentle girl who had seemed to lack the ruthlessness a sovereign needed had shown that ruthlessness for the first time—and in that moment, Is had fully acknowledged her as the next duke. That, Chess had thought, was the whole of it.
But looking back carefully, every piece of it was bound tightly to his own son, Zion.
Zion had swallowed the poison that led to Cain's execution. Zion had nearly been violated and been struck across the face, and that single insult had been paid for with a duel. Even now the Kilinear ducal house was still in an uproar from the aftermath of that price.
A deep, relentless obsession with Zion. All of it traced back to that.
"I was never afraid of my daughter becoming a Sword Master. I believed I knew her well, and I trusted her. So I thought she could never truly become dangerous."
"Of course Lady Helena's talent and power are among the finest one could name, but…"
"I am not entirely free of worry as a parent either. Still, I suspect I do not worry quite as much as you do."
It was not that he feared Helena coming to harm—it was that Helena herself was dangerous. That was what worried him. Is felt that slender difference with aching clarity, and yet on the surface he continued to behave as though nothing were amiss.
The deep, clinging abyss his only daughter had kept hidden inside her. The shock of facing it was still vivid—and still, she was his daughter. That was what stayed his hand.
"And you saw it yourself, did you not? How dangerous Helena can be."
"That is…"
Chess could not bring himself to speak.
Exactly as Is had said, the obsession Helena had revealed that day was so far beyond ordinary human measure—so darkly, clammy-handed and wet—that it still made his skin crawl.
Is regarded that silence, more eloquent than any speech, and let out a low hum before draining the half-cooled tea in a single swallow. It was a small wish that the frustration piled up inside him might sink away with it.
"Yes. Which is precisely why your son is indispensable. I am sorry to lay such a heavy burden on the boy's shoulders."
Paradoxically, Helena's reverse scale was the single greatest reason Helena remained stable at all.
Zion Altram loomed so large in Helena Krauser's world that she would almost certainly grieve his death more than the death of her own parents. One could fairly call him her highest priority.
"A heavy burden? Nothing of the sort. When Her Grace declared her intent to become engaged, I was only overwhelmed that my son should receive a grace so far above his station…"
"At this point I am the one who feels like dropping to my knees. Your son is playing a role of that magnitude. If I may put it grandly, one might even call it fate."
Loving a man did not, by itself, produce such extremes.
So the black mass Helena had carried inside her had almost certainly always been there—and Chess's son was the one who had held it in check. That she had come to fixate on the boy who had once been a kind of guardian in the process was, by any measure, a cruel twist of fate… and yet for Krauser's sake, it was essential.
An indispensable element for guiding that talent in a whole and proper direction.
"Being a noble really is something else…"
In one of the guest rooms of an inn, a cluster of dark elves had gathered snugly in a spacious chamber, laughing as they shook off the fatigue of the road.
Their hosts had gone out of their way to prepare expensive, generous rooms with them in mind—and the treatment they had received all along the way still filled them with a fresh, unexpected gratitude.
"Right? Plenty of travel money, good horses, and now a fine room to boot…"
Olivia chimed in as she watched Dana sprawled across the bed in pure bliss.
Splitting their numbers and bedding down in cheap rooms had once been their everyday reality. Ever since they had come to the Krauser Dukedom, though, everything had begun to fall into place. It felt as though they were finally shedding more than half a century of accumulated bad luck.
"Still, I know nobles are supposed to be loose… but I've never seen anyone be so chastely loose. Am I right?"
"I am in profound agreement."
Adela, who ordinarily kept silent watch without a word, rarely raised a hand in endorsement—and did so now. The other women sprawled out with all their strength shared more or less the same thought, and tossed in a comment or two of their own.
"Though I doubt he'd be acting like that if he hadn't already noticed Ellen isn't just some ordinary acquaintance."
Olivia smirked as she gestured toward the room next door, where the creaking still went on even now.
With hearing sharper than a human's, they could catch the faint scrape of the bedframe and the muffled sounds of stifled moans. The place had decent soundproofing, which was the only reason it stopped at this; in a cheap inn they would have heard everything as clearly as if it were happening right in front of them.
"Maybe so. The Duke of Krauser is good at self-suggestion. Flip that around and it means that as long as the mask doesn't slip, she won't truly open her heart either."
"Kind, but drawing a hard line—that sort of person? They're surprisingly hard to deal with."
"Hard to deal with would be lucky. Do you know how much work it takes to cross that line? Most people never get the chance, so they just shrug and move on."
The conversation of women who had seen every stripe of humanity carried the weight of years. And yet they remained as lively and childlike as ever—a difference that laid bare the gap between human and elf, born of species and of the gulf in natural lifespan.
"With a face like his, you'd think women would be swarming him, but he just holds his post. That's weird too."
"Come on. He's got a body men would drool over and then some, and she's obedient on top of it. If I were a man, my eyes would be spinning."
"Still strange, though. Even the tastiest food gets dull if you eat it every day. Looking for snacks or special dishes is just human nature for a lot of them."
They went on about how the staple sometimes became the snack and the snack the main course—rather heated talk, all of it. Of course they had not the slightest intention of insulting their employer. It was more like the way people gasp in admiration when they see something rare.
"Anyway, it's a lot nicer to look at than people spreading their legs or pounding away all over the place. Right?"
"Can't argue with that."
Even as the dark elf company grew heated and spilled every kind of talk, Ellen alone kept quiet, only listening. She had lived roughly enough herself—but a certain man's image kept rising unbidden in her mind.
The man Ellen pictured alone was Zion.
Drenched in sweat. The solid body revealed when he stripped off his upper clothes, and the well-trained erector spinae that made one swallow without meaning to. The memory of noticing those compact, streamlined muscles—not oversized, just densely packed—was still vivid. Of course, in the process she had sometimes caught Helena's impassioned stare… but it had been cute enough that she let it pass.
"…Ellen. Ellen!"
"Huh—what? What is it?"
"Nothing. You weren't asleep, but you were staring into space, so I wondered if you were feeling sick."
Ellen started and looked around, eyes wide. Olivia's call had yanked her out of the daydream, but the jolt was strong enough that she still looked dazed. Calling someone lost in deep thought often produced that reaction, so it was nothing remarkable.
Olivia, however, seemed to have fished something up from the moment—and her smile curved into something thoroughly wicked.
"What? Were you imagining the Altram son?"
How did she—!
Ellen startled before she could stop herself, then smoothed her expression in the space of a blink. She looked as though she had never been flustered at all—but dark elves with sharp eyes were not about to miss it.
"Oho~. So that's how it is. Well, Ellen did hang around the training grounds with those two, after all."
"I mean, yes, but… why bring that up all of a sudden?"
"No reason. I was just thinking—you said the Altram boy took a pretty rough thrashing back then. So you naturally got a look at bare skin, right?"
Ripples spread again through Ellen's heart, which she had not yet fully steadied. Olivia's question stabbed the bull's-eye as if she could read every thought, and there was no peaceful way left to hold the line. She had already been conscious of the man from their blatant conversation; of course things had reached a point she could no longer salvage.
If anyone else had been present she might not have loosened the reins of her tension—but then this kind of talk would never have come up in the first place. In the end, Ellen's face flushing as she was driven into a corner was only inevitable.
"I saw, sure… but what does that have to do with anything right now?!"
When Ellen raised her voice, Olivia and the other dark elves only let out low squeals of delight. It was the satisfaction of watching a fish take the bait.
"What does it have to do with? Plenty. Our Ellen finally met a man worth noticing, and you're saying it doesn't matter?"
"Noticing—! I never did any such thing!"
"Fine. Let's say you don't notice him. Would you sleep with him if you got the chance?"
No one had ever thrown open advances at them quite so bluntly, but they had heard talk like this for meals and developed thick immunity. Ellen was no different. She did not suddenly blush at talk of flesh and pleasure itself—yet because of who the subject was, a clear embarrassment colored her face.
"Do you… really think that makes any sense?"
"Normally it doesn't. Whatever the race, the only ones we meet are the ones who shun us, and I've long since resigned myself to growing old and dying without a partner. You know that too, Ellen. If we want to mate freely and live, we'd have to catch some mindless monster and roll around with it—and monsters are just… no."
Olivia's words were crude enough to make anyone frown, but they were true. As the dark elf who had first mixed into human society, Ellen knew that truth down to the bone. They were shut out wherever they went.
"Yeah. I know."
"So if a man who doesn't mind dark elves shows up, of course you can't let him slip away. Say, for example… Zion Altram."
"Don't be ridiculous. There's no way that would work."
"Impossible right this second, sure. But look—whatever the reason, these people are putting real effort into us after bringing us into the same fold. In some form or another, we might end up with results."
It was a hope that bordered on empty despair—and yet Ellen felt the possibility too. Without thinking, she nodded.
"So when that time comes, you slip in quietly and take a seed. Stealing from the Duchess is out of the question, and none of us are that shameless. Just a little corner of a place would be more than enough to be grateful for."
The naked suggestion that she become a concubine should have made her scowl—but Ellen, listening, only bowed her head as if the piercing shame were too much to bear. She knew better than anyone how barren her fate was when it came to building a household, and she had glimpsed that possibility without meaning to.
Yes. Nobles kept any number of mistresses in secret. Some even married several wives. Which meant, in other words…