See You Tomorrow
"See you tomorrow!"
…So the Engagement Contest really was a festival after all.
She had never realized it, spending every day in the silence of the library. The Engagement Contest was the greatest festival in the entire Northern Territory. Beyond the white noise of turning pages, she had simply closed her ears and never heard a thing. Everyone had been talking about the Engagement Contest the whole time.
Only when Ariel widened her book-focused gaze and opened those long-closed ears did the heat of the contest finally wash over her in full. And now—
There are so many people.
—she was right in the middle of that heat.
This was the northern plaza of the Grand Ducal Castle, where the carriages of the final candidates who had finished the second evaluation would arrive. Off-duty servants and those who had briefly slipped away from their posts had gathered in a seething throng. Ariel was wedged among them, all of them here to catch a glimpse of the final candidate they each supported.
How a girl who ought to have been buried in books at the library had ended up in a place like this was a mystery even to herself. For a moment she wondered if she had simply blacked out. What had she even come here wanting to do?
She had been swept along like a leaf caught in a flood of excitement heading for the northern plaza, yet now that she stood here she had no idea what she was supposed to do.
"Young Master Deron Kellid’s golden hair is more dazzling than a field of ripe wheat!"
"Hmph, so what? Young Master Blund is the handsomest of them all!"
"Kyaa—to see him this close! I’ve been counting down the days for this!"
"They say Young Master Kyle’s black eyes are so deep that once you look into them you can never climb back out!"
Nine-tenths of the gathered crowd were female servants, and of course the endless stream of praise and adoration built on half-imagined romances never stopped. The atmosphere was nothing new to Ariel, who had always gotten along freely with the maids. The maids back at the dormitory did exactly the same whenever they talked about their chosen candidates.
The sad part was that among all of them, not a single person—
…No one is talking about Elden.
She understood why. Even the maids at the dormitory never so much as opened their mouths about him. Unlike the other candidates, whose surface reputations were either decent or merely dry, Elden’s reputation had long since hit rock bottom and kept drilling straight into the earth’s crust.
Ariel herself had heard Elden’s nicknames: the Dog Bastard, the Drunken Brawler, the Riot-Starter, and the rest. When Elden introduced himself in the freshman class, the classmates around him had whispered exactly that.
That’s him. The young master of the baronial house in the Trimirion Duchy who’s famous as a complete bastard.
No, not just a bastard—they say he’s a dog bastard.
No, no. Not a dog bastard. A full-blown lunatic.
Back then she had simply thought, Ah, I see, and moved on. Their natures were so different that she never expected their paths would cross. She had taken one look, thought He really does look scary, and forgotten about him.
As expected, nothing major ever tied them together during their school years. They graduated the Academy without any particular connection, and the existence known as Elden faded into the far reaches of memory. No—not only Elden. Every story from her Academy days had grown that hazy.
If she had never run into Elden in the library, she would have found it perfectly natural that no one ever mentioned his name. Being looked down on was only natural, after all.
The problem was that years later she had coincidentally reunited with him, and the man he was now did not match the old infamy at all. In the few days she had seen him, he had kept his distance from the drinking and fighting that used to be his permanent tags. The same man who once treated commoners like slaves was now sparring as equals with a commoner knight named Rachel. On top of that, he preferred reading and quiet reflection over pleasure and instinct, and he was steadily laying plans for the future rather than living only for the present.
It’s only because you people haven’t seen the Elden of today.
Of course, before she reunited with him, whenever heated debates broke out over whether the Third Grand Duchess had strange tastes or had simply mistaken another candidate for putting Elden on the final list, Ariel had always taken the same attitude: What do I care?
Reading one more line of a book was far more useful than fretting over someone else’s husband candidates. Investing energy and time into preparations for reading was more useful than wasting them on pointless things.
And yet now, the people ignoring Elden felt a little… irritating. Of course she knew how utterly pretentious and ridiculous that feeling was. How well could she claim to know someone she had never even been close to, just because a few days had passed since their reunion? She was nothing more than a reading companion who happened to share pure literature with him, after all.
Anyway.
I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.
Well. Since she was already here, she might as well look at Elden’s face and then go back.
By the way—
They said he had the highest score in the second evaluation, so does that mean Young Master Kyle is in the lead?
Official information had not been released, so opinions on the victor were all over the place, yet there was not a single rumor of Elden’s victory among them. Erincia had said it before:
If Young Master Elden simply sets his mind to it, he will certainly win.
From what she had heard, the second evaluation tested physical strength, and if that was the case, Ariel believed it was a test perfectly optimized for Elden. Her faith had grounds.
Elden was always first, wasn’t he?
In Physical Education—the subject that tested a human body’s capabilities—Elden had always recorded first place by an overwhelming margin. Reflexes, strength, stamina: all of them had towered so high above his “classmates” that the other candidates who were his “classmates” could never have stood a chance.
That was why, honestly, Ariel was half-convinced.
Didn’t Elden win?
Young Master Kyle’s victory was the rumor she heard most often, yet Deron’s and Blund’s names also popped up often enough that she could not rule out the possibility of Elden’s victory. Perhaps the impatient desire to confirm that very thing was what had dragged her all the way here.
Just then the entire plaza erupted in noise. A single carriage had entered the Grand Ducal Castle through the northern gate. It would stop in the plaza where the statue of Loctard, the First Winter King and founder of the Winterfell Grand Ducal House, stood. Swept along by the crowd rapidly clustering around it, Ariel was forced to move into the plaza as well.
"Ughk."
She let out a short scream as she went.
"Who is it?! Young Master Deron, maybe?"
"No way. It has to be Young Master Kyle! The victor is supposed to ride in the lead!"
"Don’t be ridiculous~ Can’t you see those noble features shining through the curtains? It’s definitely Young Master Blund~!"
The crowd squealed and speculated about the candidate inside the carriage. Crushed between them, Ariel only wished that whoever it was would please just get out already. At this rate she was going to be flattened into tortilla dough.
Click.
The coachman who had stepped down from the carriage took hold of the door handle. Every eye fixed on that single point. Then the door opened, and an awkward silence swept through the plaza—caused by one young master with jet-black hair, crimson eyes, and a thoroughly bored expression, casually chewing on a piece of fruit.
And in that silence, a single woman’s lonely cry rang out.
"Elden—!"
The Middle Ages are fine and all, but…
Travel was ridiculously inconvenient. The ride itself was bearable as long as the fancy cushions kept the jolting from getting too bad, yet the distance covered by three horses’ worth of power stretched forever, and the boredom was absolute. Still, I would have to get used to it. Compared to a culinary pilgrimage spanning the entire kingdom, this was nothing.
Creak.
Fortunately, right before I could suggest a game of hand-clapping (??) to Rachel, the carriage stopped in the northern plaza of the Grand Ducal Castle. The whole area seemed bustling, but the curtains were drawn so I could not see outside.
"We have arrived, Young Master."
"Good work."
A moment later I poked my head out the door the coachman had opened, and immediately understood what all the fuss was about. The northern plaza was packed with women.
Fans, huh.
There was no way anyone was waiting with bated breath for the dog-bastard young master. These would be fans of the three who were coming after me. As befitting male leads of a romance fantasy, they were all pretty boy types with soft, handsome faces.
So I was about to step down the stairs with complete indifference when—
"Elden—!"
A voice called my name. Ohhh, so I had a girl fan after all! I quickly looked toward the source and spotted a woman being crushed flat between the crowd. A slender figure with golden rolled-bun hair—it was Ariel.
What was the girl who should have been in the library doing out at the crack of dawn, and what was she doing now wedged among the Grand Ducal Castle’s servants?
When I answered her awkward little wave with a wave of my own, Ariel—who had been getting flatter by the second—began shoving her way out of the throng.
"E-excuse me for a moment."
I stepped down with Rachel and waited. Soon enough I was face to face with Ariel. In the meantime the remaining carriages arrived and every gaze scattered. As expected, no one had been waiting for me—except for our rolled-bun young lady, of course.
"What brings you here?"
"Ah, how was the second evaluation? Did you win?"
…So that was why the bookworm had spared her precious time. She had come all this way just to check on this morning’s curse, had she?
A mischievous impulse rose for no good reason, and I answered with a light snort of laughter.
"I won, thanks to all your enthusiastic cheering."
I fully expected her to light up with joy. The bright face that had cheered me on was still vivid in my memory. If she looked happy, I planned to tease her by saying I had actually lost—a tiny bit of petty revenge for that pure-hearted curse of hers.
But strangely enough, only an odd light settled over Ariel’s face. The lips that should have been smiling brightly parted uncertainly, and the eyes that should have sparkled with delight only trembled finely.
It was a baffling reaction.
"…?"
"Y-you really won…?"
A reaction too awkward to keep teasing. A joke I had started alone, I would have to clean up alone.
"Just kidding. I actually lost. Officially, Kyle won."
"What?"
Yet at that cleanup, the energy that had shrunk back into her suddenly blossomed wide open again. The awkwardly parted lips curved into a beautiful arc. The finely trembling eyes filled with clear delight instead.
A reaction flowing in the exact opposite direction of everything I had expected. Today Ariel was completely impossible to predict.
That same Ariel carefully asked,
"…You lost? Really?"
"I never even wanted to win in the first place."
At my casual answer, Ariel’s face went blank with surprise.
"!"
I made a questioning face of my own.
"?"
Then Ariel fidgeted with her fingers and asked,
"Then… um… will you come to the library tomorrow morning?"
There was no reason for any change to come to the rest and healing I had only just begun. No matter what storm might arrive, a deep-rooted tree did not sway. Just as always, I planned to fulfill my duty as a golden retriever through reading and training. That was the life Lee Jun-woo wanted.
So I nodded and answered,
"Of course."
Ariel beamed, said her goodbyes, and walked away.
"Okay! Then I’ll be going! See you tomorrow!"
……Uh.
Well.
Yeah.
See you tomorrow.