Why Is This Here...?
Having accused Vireire, Serena sank into her seat and began to gnaw at her nails.
"Ah, no. The madam would never... she couldn't. There has to be some mistake..."
Betrayal at the hands of someone she had trusted without question, and the denial that rushed in after it. Serena played the frail victim to perfection.
Aileen took hold of both her shoulders.
"Miss Serena. Moments like this are precisely when you must keep a firm hold of yourself."
"Hic...! Wh-what am I supposed to do...?"
Serena clung to her as if she might fall and began to weep against Aileen's breast. Patting the girl's back, Aileen turned to Rieseira.
"Miss Rieseira. Would you be so kind as to summon the Duchess?"
Before long Vireire appeared with Rieseira at her side. She had been told nothing beyond the fact that the matter was urgent, and so, finding Lumina worse than she had been only a short while ago, she leapt to the conclusion that this must be why she had been called.
At last. She's dying...!
Inwardly she rejoiced. Outwardly, she played the stepmother sick with worry for her stepdaughter.
"Lumina, Lumina... are you awake?"
"......"
"Lady Polaris. I beg you, let this child pass through the crisis..."
"......"
And that hypocrisy was watched, from start to finish, by Aileen Deneb and Rieseira Rastaban, their eyes gone cold.
Only once Vireire had displayed quite enough of it did Lumina speak, her voice barely there.
"Mother... I... I overheard..."
"What? Overheard what?"
"The medicine you gave me... that it turned the silver spoon black... it isn't true... is it...?"
Vireire's eyes flew wide. Only then did she take in the silver spoon lying on the floor, and Serena staring at it with a blank, shattered face. She lifted the spoon in a trembling hand. Where it had met the poison, the silver had gone black.
Serena, her gaze brimming, called to her in a sobbing voice thin as a ghost's.
"Madam... why...? What could our Lady Lumina possibly have done so wrong?"
"A misunderstanding. Something must have gone wrong. Yes—the medicine was mixed incorrectly... or I mistook one remedy for another..."
She was still spinning excuses when the butler, drawn by the uproar in the residence, stepped into the treatment room. He listened with a grave face, then departed to make his report to the Duke.
The next morning, the Duke summoned every person of consequence then staying at the ducal residence. Serena, as Lumina's closest attendant, was there, and so were Aileen and Rieseira. When they had all assembled, he turned to Serena.
"Serena Meridiana. Do you still have the medicine my wife gave you?"
Serena drew the bottle of poison from her bosom.
"Give it here."
He held out his hand. Serena clutched the bottle to her chest like a squirrel refusing to surrender its nuts.
"Forgive me, Your Grace! Until the truth is brought to light, I cannot entrust this to anyone!"
At her defiance, the Duke's brow creased.
"What did you say?"
Displeasure soured the Empire's Sword Saint, and a crushing pressure rolled off him and over Serena. She did not feel threatened in the slightest. She herself was a fighter of the very highest order, even if she fell short of a Sword Saint, and besides—
Deneb and Rastaban are watching. Is he actually going to hit me?
Aileen and Rieseira were in the room. Lay a hand on Serena here, and he would be a tyrant beyond all argument. She knew perfectly well that he would never touch her.
"Serena Meridiana. Say that again."
She answered with an exaggerated tremble.
"This is a grave threat against my mistress! Even if I die where I stand, this evidence is mine to protect—even if the one demanding it is Your Grace himself...!"
She bent to him in a precise right-angle bow.
"Your Grace! I beg you to take my circumstances into account...!"
"Hm."
The desperate performance softened his expression. Unexpected, if one wished to call it unexpected. Quite apart from his indifference toward Lumina, he thought rather well of Serena.
Lumina was a ducal daughter her own house had cast aside. Even a maid on her first day in the residence knew as much. And yet Serena had not abandoned her. She had remained at Lumina's side in loyalty and good faith, even throwing away the chance to serve as maid to Princess Altair—the post everyone coveted. Whatever the profit, whatever the loss, a lord once chosen would never be forsaken. To a man who was a knight to the marrow before he was a duke, the sight was deeply impressive.
I am sorry for my wife... but the other vassals are watching. I shall have to make at least a show of treating this seriously.
He set aside the notion of smoothing the matter over.
"Then I will ask something else. Will you cooperate, so that the bottle may be examined?"
At the abrupt change in his bearing, Serena cheered inwardly. The performance had been a gambit built on the character she had already taken apart. Gladly, she bent low before him.
"Thank you! I shall cooperate fully with the investigation...!"
Under the Duke's orders, the poison was investigated. He summoned a magical investigator and an apothecary and charged them with analyzing both the toxin and the bottle that held it.
"House Meridiana knows an excellent physician!"
Meanwhile, Serena quietly produced a doctor already under her influence and had Lumina examined. Paid enough gold to open a modest clinic in the imperial capital, the physician delivered exactly the diagnosis she wanted.
"It is chronic arsenic poisoning."
Serena put on a puzzled face.
"Not acute...?"
"She has been exposed to arsenic for quite some time. Two years, at the least."
Serena covered her mouth, feigning a shock far larger than she felt. The news tore through the ducal house in an instant.
The report she had been waiting for arrived from the apothecary and the magical investigator as well. The apothecary found a high concentration of arsenic in the poison. The investigator drew traces of Vireire's mana from the bottle that had contained it. Circumstance after circumstance pointed to the same conclusion: Vireire had meant to poison Lumina, and she had been at it for a very long time.
Vireire insisted she had been deceived as well, and she raged that she would take the head of the attending physician who had dared harm Lumina, along with the neck of a mastermind who did not even exist. None of it held once a second bottle of poison was discovered in her room.
"Why is this here...?"
Staring at the poison found in her own chambers, Vireire looked genuinely at a loss. She truly did not know. Serena had slipped in at dawn and left it there. But Vireire's mana was detected on that bottle too, and her aggrieved bewilderment was taken for a shameless lie. For the record, no trace of the one who had planted it was found. Meticulous Serena was not sloppy enough to leave her own behind.
And so it was settled. Vireire had tried to poison Lumina. Before his vassals, the Duke made his position official.
"This affair came about because my wife wished to make Radian the sole heir of Sirius. I do not fail to understand the feeling. The means, however, were far too extreme."
He turned to Serena, standing in the place of Lumina, who was still confined to her sickbed.
"I therefore order my wife into seclusion. And as apology and recompense, I will bestow upon Lumina the title and lands of the Maia Barony."
Then he faced Vireire.
"This settles the matter of Lumina's inheritance. Reflect in seclusion, and see that you commit no further rashness hereafter."
Vireire's lips trembled. She bowed her head.
"...I understand."
At the judgment, Serena clicked her tongue where no one could hear.
Honestly.
The Maia Barony was a tiny village in the middle of nowhere. What the Duke had just told Vireire, in so many words, was that Lumina would inherit this far and no farther, that all the rest would go to Radian, and that his wife would do well not to overreach.
So we're to take this scrap and get lost? She's his own daughter. Isn't this a bit much for a girl who nearly died?
She was not the only one who thought so. A small sigh drifted from a corner. Aileen. Seasoned countess that she was, she knew how to govern her feelings, but in this moment she had decided that even a flicker of regret ought to be shown. Rieseira sighed with her.
The two women's reaction settled the heat rising in Serena's chest.
Calm down.
She thought it through with a cool head.
I never expected this to finish Vireire anyway.
At best, it was a beginning. Seen that way, the opening move had gone rather well. Formal though it was, she had pried something out of the Duke. A friend in need is a friend indeed—and she had confirmed that Deneb and Rastaban were Lumina's. Most decisive of all, she had stripped Vireire's ugliness and hypocrisy bare in front of everyone.
Yes. That was what mattered. Every attack from here on would be aimed, without mercy, at dragging Vireire's reputation down.
And neither my nature nor Lumina's showed itself at all.
Rather than denounce Vireire outright, Serena had played, to the last detail, the girl betrayed by someone she had trusted. No one had noticed that she and Lumina had sharp fangs, or that those fangs were already set on Vireire's throat. Not even Vireire herself.
Which was to say that Vireire had not yet recognized them as enemies. More precisely, she had been unable to. And that meant they could strike again as often as they pleased.
Now then. What shall we do next...
From that fact, Serena began to set her schemes in order. The schemes that would bring Vireire down.