A Bundle of Trouble
"Um…"
His out-of-nowhere declaration of loyalty left me flustered. Not knowing what to say in reply, I scratched the bridge of my nose as I looked at him. Why would a man lay his life on the line over a single promise from the family's heir to work hard as its head?
Matthew, meanwhile, was dabbing at his eyes with his sleeve, overcome with emotion.
"Yes, Matthew. I intend to become the official head of this house and work hard at it. Um — would you give me a moment? I have some documents to go through."
I barely managed to soothe him and usher him out. Even on his way to the door, he kept holding forth on the history and glory of House Ehrenberg, showering me with toe-curling praise about how overjoyed he was that I should carry on Ehrenberg's splendid legacy — I honestly lost count of how much.
"Good grief, what a spectacle."
Sinking back onto the sofa, I found myself thinking of the Matthew of years past.
After my parents passed away, he had tended to me like a baby bird. Then one day, out of nowhere, he began keeping his distance. I'd assumed Count Kolkos had bought him off, but judging by what I'd seen today, it seemed Matthew had simply been disappointed that I took no interest in the family.
Come to think of it, Matthew was never exactly warm toward Count Kolkos either.
Unless the count himself came calling at the Ehrenberg residence, the two of them had no reason to cross paths.
And I suspected that Matthew of all people.
There was wisdom in sounding out the bridge before you crossed it — a little wariness of the people around you never hurt — but going forward, I would observe more carefully rather than suspect blindly.
With my doubts about Matthew dispelled, it felt as though a weight pressing on my shoulders had been cast off. Lighter of heart, I threw myself into the pile of documents.
Reading them didn't take long. Aside from the report sitting on top, most were petitions penned by territory residents who knew their letters.
Nobel is the problem.
Nobel — the most barren of all the lands under Ehrenberg. It was the only territory in the kingdom where monsters lived. Around the time the blazing war between humans and monsters was drawing to a close, the king had driven the surviving monsters into Nobel. The land was vast, but it lay at the far edge of the north, ringed by mountains, and three of its four seasons were cold. Perhaps that was why the crown had judged it no great loss to hand over to monsters.
And House Ehrenberg had taken charge of that land. Ever since, for hundreds of years, when spring came, the realm's finest knights rode out on expedition to Nobel.
The Silver Expedition.
For all its romantic name, the expedition was nothing more than a monster-slaughter brigade. Nobel had been nothing but a burden to Ehrenberg.
And yet Father had loved it — because it was my mother's homeland.
A love story between an innocent country girl and a lord's son, of all things.
The guileless girl who lived in Nobel and the lord's heir leading the Silver Expedition fell for each other at first sight. How romantic. Father always used to tell me: marry someone you love.
Ignore his advice, marry without thinking, and ruin your life — that was me.
Which was exactly why children ought to listen to their parents.
Nobel, where Mother was born and raised and where Father had fallen in love, was a territory that attracted no end of talk and trouble. And reading the report, I remembered: around about this very year, the people of Nobel, crushed under their taxes, had risen in revolt.
Count Kolkos, my guardian at the time, had moved to crush them by force. The Silver Expedition had swung its swords not at monsters, but at the residents of Nobel. In response, the enraged townsfolk smashed the boundary stones that held the monsters in check, and all hell broke loose.
That idiot, Count Kolkos!
The mere thought of him coiled fury around my body.
"My lady, you're crumpling the documents."
Apparently my hand had been squeezing the papers without my noticing. Jenice remarked on it as she set down the tea she'd brought. I smoothed the pages flat again and gave an awkward smile.
"Master Matthew sent these up, saying you were bound to be hungry."
Jenice arranged a plate of sweet cookies and a teacup neatly before me. Whether it was my overworked brain or simply the sweet smell, my mouth began to water. I had documents to read — but I wanted to eat, too.
"Once you've had those, I'll bring in a proper meal."
Since Jenice insisted, I had no choice but to hold the documents in one hand and a cookie in the other. So absorbed did I become in the papers that I never even noticed her leave.
Matthew had called them materials on the revision of the local tax law, but rather than concrete figures, they were mostly denunciations from residents worn down by taxation.
Which means this isn't the kind of problem a few corrected numbers will fix.
Crunch. I bit into my cookie and forced myself to focus.
Lower the taxes and someone, somewhere, takes the hit. I can't go tampering with tax law on a whim.
House Ehrenberg's rates were already markedly lower than anyone else's — even now, the heads of other noble houses grumbled about it.
And Nobel's rates were already lower than other regions' to begin with.
To lower them further, we would have no choice but to cut the levy collected by the crown, and even Ehrenberg couldn't march up to the king and demand a tax cut out of the blue. Besides, Nobel already paid less in royal taxes than other regions, because the crown knew full well the damage the monsters inflicted there.
Huh? What's this? The taxes went up the moment Father died?
Something odd had caught my eye as I paged through the papers: Nobel's taxes had been raised.
Nobel was a special region where monsters appeared, so raising its taxes required at least a token negotiation between the head of the house and the king. Yet I had no memory of any such negotiation. Granted, I wasn't the official head yet, so that much could be excused — but I'd never so much as heard talk of a negotiation taking place, and that was strange. No one in House Ehrenberg currently held the authority to negotiate on the family's behalf, which meant word of it should have reached me, too.
Did His Majesty raise the taxes on his own? I ought to lodge a formal objection about this.
But that, too, was something only the head of the house could do. And I couldn't simply sit on my hands and watch. If I couldn't become the head right away, then I would have to find another way.
Oh dear. Even if those taxes were raised arbitrarily, I can't just lower Nobel's on its own.
"Because monsters appear there" — that excuse had been worked to death. Even where the damage was real, from the outside it would read like a stale, outworn pretext.
Just how bad are things over there?
I would have to go see Nobel for myself — to confirm the territory's condition with my own eyes, to learn whether a solution existed within Nobel's borders, and why the monsters had begun raging. But going right away was out of the question. I couldn't turn up empty-handed, and I certainly couldn't go alone. Besides, the people of Nobel would welcome a visit from their lord far more warmly than one from the lord's daughter.
Clearly, I needed to sweet-talk that adorable prince of mine, and the sooner the better.
Come to think of it, maybe I should pay Cassion a visit.
I set the finished documents to one side and brushed the cookie crumbs from my fingers. I was just rising from my seat when — BANG — the door flew open.
"Brought him. The loon."
Chyo dumped the enormous bundle she'd been dragging down at my feet with a thud. At the dull impact, the great lump flinched.
"Is that what I asked you to bring?"
Don't tell me she'd stuffed a person into a bundle. And then dragged him here by the rope? In disbelief, I pointed a finger at it.
"He put up a fight."
Chyo shrugged as if it were nothing.
"You're remarkably strong."
Half of me prayed she'd brought Rebert back in one piece; the other half was genuinely in awe of her monstrous strength. She'd hauled a bundle with a person inside all the way up to a room on the fourth floor. Was that even humanly possible?
"I've got something nice, though."
Chyo grinned and held up her hand. Set into the leather glove she wore gleamed a magic stone — which meant an expensive magic tool.
Magic tools were objects set with magic stones and imbued with permanent enchantments, and depending on the type of permanent spell, their prices ranged from pocket change to small fortunes. Naturally, the more advanced the enchantment an item carried, the steeper its price. A tool that amplified strength required magic of a considerably high order even among spells, and magic stones capable of bearing such an enchantment were themselves hard to come by.
Magic stones formed when the bones of monsters, buried in the earth for ages, transformed into mineral. That transformation already took an eternity — and not just any monster bone would do. Only the bones of monsters that carried mana could become magic stones. On top of that, they were difficult to mine and difficult to work. With mages having grown scarce, demand for magic stones far outstripped the meager supply, and their price had climbed without limit.
In a word, what Chyo was wearing was —
A rare item.
Where on earth had she gotten it?
Hardly the possession of an aunt who weeps over being unable to pay her underlings' wages.
"I didn't steal it. What do you take your aunt for?"
Chyo frowned at me — apparently I'd been giving her a suspicious look without realizing it.
"An information hunter. And really, is it so strange to turn information into money? You were always going around declaring that information is money."
"Did I ever say that to you?" I murmured as I worked loose the knots of the bundle Chyo had tied.
Of course I hadn't. That famous line, the story went, had been uttered after Chyorny — working as spies — brought some country's war to an end. And that war was still years away from happening. Words I had no business knowing at all.
"Just once — in passing. Anyway, he is alive, right?"
My aunt was never sharp about anything that wasn't a transaction, so a loose answer like that would surely pass unexamined.
"Open it."
Instead of answering my question, she nudged the bundle with her toe. Her refusal to give a straight answer made me uneasy, and I hurried to open the sack.
Through the gap, along with a foul stench, the crumpled form of a person came into view.
"My lady! Your meal — GAH!"
Jenice had appeared. She took in the sight of me, Chyo, and the bloodstained sky-blue hair jutting out of the bundle in my hands — and her eyes blazed.
"My lady, get away from that thing!"
Jenice all but flung the tray of food down and came rushing over. I wasn't sure she realized that the Jenice barreling toward me was the scarier threat of the two.
She pried me away from the bundle and hauled Rebert out of the sack. It was a moment for Jenice's monstrous strength to shine. She laid him flat on the floor, pressed her ear to his chest, and checked for breath.
"He's alive, my lady."
"I could have told he was alive without going that far. Still, we can't leave him like this. Auntie, would you carry him to the bed for now?"
"Order the servants. Do I look like someone who does chores?"
"Not the servants! We can't have anyone finding out there's a man covered head to toe in blood in your adorable, precious room, my lady!" Jenice objected, then added, "At the very least, he gets cleaned up before anyone catches us!"
"…And how, exactly, is that any different?"
Chyo asked her in a tone of utter incomprehension, and Jenice answered, still flustered: "So that if rumors do get out, they're at least clean ones! Even my lady has tastes and standards, you know!"
Um, I had a fair idea what kind of rumor she meant, but I was thirteen, thank you very much. At an age where even an innocent romance rumor was something I'd rather do without.
"Jenice, enough talking — help me lift him."
Chyo clearly had no intention of helping, so moving Rebert fell to Jenice and me.
His ankles are awfully thin.
I knew exactly how the black-market dealers treated the children they brought out of the slums.
No wonder so many of those children ended up hurt and sick.
Was it because he had treated his wounded childhood friends with his own two hands that Rebert grew up to develop his revolutionary medicines? It was, I decided, a perfectly reasonable guess.