Remnants of Malice (2)
Having finished making her request to her eldest sister Arina, Flora ran straight into Karsein the moment she stepped out of the study.
The smile that had been playing on her lips drained away in an instant, replaced by worry. Tormented by the thought that Karsein might refuse, she climbed back up the stairs and watched from a hiding spot nearby.
"When is he going to come out...?"
It was taking Karsein quite a while to finish his meeting in Arina's room.
Arina had promised to put in a good word for him. But when it dragged on this long, Flora couldn't help growing anxious.
Come to think of it, even her eldest sister—who usually agreed to anything on the spot—had seemed to hesitate a little this time...
"Was it too much to ask...?"
It couldn't be.
And yet, another thought gnawed at her: what if Karsein simply refused to attend the tea party at all?
Her spirits sinking, Flora let her head droop.
Right at that moment—
Karsein opened the door and stepped out.
-Click.
'Eep!'
Flora clapped a hand over her mouth and ducked behind the side of the staircase.
He didn't hear me. Surely not. He couldn't have—not from this distance.
"Learn as much as you can while you're there. If you come back changed even a little, you'll have no trouble getting your seat at the council meetings back."
Arina's voice. Flora's ears perked up.
Telling him to learn a lot while he was there meant Karsein had agreed to go to the tea party, didn't it?
The anxiety that had fluttered in her chest—what if he says no?—flew away like a butterfly on the wind at the sound of her sister's voice.
What she hadn't anticipated at all, however, was that Karsein would walk straight toward her. The instant their eyes met, Flora could only go rigid, her breath catching in her throat.
"What are you doing here?"
"Huh? Uh, um... th-that's..."
What do I say?
Her eyes spinning in panic for a moment, Flora blurted out the first thing that came to her.
"S-so what if I'm standing here!"
"...Huh?"
Karsein let out a bemused little laugh, as if he found the whole thing ridiculous.
Which only made Flora react like a thief whose feet had gone numb under her.
"I'm allowed to walk up these stairs! You were standing here yourself just now! Is there some reason I can't be here?"
It was her right, wasn't it? The youngest daughter of the ducal house walking through her own home—perfectly natural.
Flora stood her ground boldly, convinced there was nothing about her presence that could be picked apart.
Completely unaware that her very defensiveness gave everything away.
"Did anyone say anything to you?"
"...Huh?"
"Nobody's said a word. Why are you getting all worked up on your own? Honestly."
Karsein hadn't accused her of anything, yet here she was, throwing a fuss all by herself.
And now that it had played out this way, there was nothing left for her to say.
Flora, disliking that for no good reason, started to whine.
"You're in no position to talk to me like that! You only got this chance because of me. If I hadn't asked, you wouldn't even have the right to attend the Eastern Noble Conference!"
"So what? You want me to thank you for it?"
"Th-that's how it's supposed to work!"
At her earnest affirmation, Karsein let out another hollow laugh.
"Ah. Right. Sure, let's go with that. So this tea party—where is it being held, and what time?"
"At the Gelgeton Viscount's villa. As for the time..."
"About two hours from now, I'd say."
"...How did you know that?"
"You there. Have a carriage readied."
Leaving her question unanswered, Karsein called for an attendant, saying he would prepare to go out.
Really, how is he going to know that?
Two hours later.
Dressed and pampered by the maids with painstaking care, Flora looked every bit the precious youngest daughter of the ducal house.
Too adorable. Too pretty.
The maids clutched at their chests or shivered with some strange, tingling delight, each of them making a spectacle of themselves in turn.
Watching them, Flora was suddenly struck by the feeling that nothing much had changed—not back then, and not now. And oddly enough, that thought left her feeling uneasy.
"Is... is Karsein getting dressed up too?"
At her out-of-the-blue question, the maids blinked. "The young master?" they echoed, then giggled and assured her there was nothing to worry about, easing a fistful of her anxiety away.
Still, the thought that anything might go wrong made her ask again—but they only told her to stop fretting, and went on smiling warmly at the sight of such a close brother and sister.
Flora came down after her preparations were complete.
She didn't even need to ask where Karsein was—he was already standing in front of the carriage.
Was Karsein... always like this?
Even leaning against the wall, he was so tall she had to tilt her chin up just to look at him.
And it wasn't just his height, either.
She had always thought of him as a scrawny, gaunt thing with nothing worth looking at. But the Karsein standing before her now felt strikingly different from that starved boy of the past.
Why had he changed so much?
Flora stared at him blankly, wondering.
"What are you doing? Over there."
"U-uh?"
"If you're ready, let's go. There's nothing good about being late."
He had a point.
Being late was bad. Among nobles, arriving a little early was the unwritten rule.
And yet... something about Karsein's appearance just now did not sit right with Flora at all.
"Why are you dressed like that?"
"What's wrong with it? I'm dressed perfectly well."
"Perfectly well, my foot! That's a place where only nobles gather... you're supposed to dress up properly for it!"
It was true. As he was now, Karsein wasn't just plain—he was aggressively plain.
Nobles dressing with some restraint was a matter of honoring the virtue of humility, but this went well past modest and deep into severe.
There wasn't a single ornament on him.
No crest, no symbol marking a noble's dignity or standing.
At the very least, he should have been wearing the emblem of House Bagrand—yet his clothes bore nothing of the sort. The only thing he carried was a single sword.
His attire was clean to a fault, and that was precisely what Flora took issue with.
"It's a tea party. It's just an event where people drink tea, isn't it? Why would I, a man, need to wear something eye-catching for that?"
"But... you're a noble too..."
"They invite me to a gathering full of noble ladies, and a man shows up in flashy clothes? That's basically telling me to go to hell. Am I wrong?"
If you dismissed it as a mere tea party, there was nothing to say back.
But this was no ordinary tea party.
"The other ladies will be bringing people along to talk with! You won't be the only man there!"
Hadn't everyone agreed to each bring a companion?
In which case it wouldn't be a gathering of women only at all.
But Karsein wouldn't budge.
"Doesn't matter. We're short on time, so let's just go."
"..."
"If you're that embarrassed by me, you're free to ride separately. Claire's at the estate right now, I hear."
"Ugh, fine! I get it! We can just go, okay?"
Ride separately because he was embarrassing? Absolutely not.
Do you have any idea how hard-won this chance was?
For Flora, the whole purpose of this tea party was to introduce Karsein properly, clear his name of the slanders against him, and change the way people saw him.
Clothes didn't matter. Getting him through that door was what counted.
And yet, in a corner of her heart, she couldn't help wondering what would have happened if she'd said something different. A simple, honest wish—that she'd wanted him to dress up nicely and look splendid.
Before long, the carriage they would ride in arrived.
Why are there two?
Flora tilted her head, glancing back and forth between the pair of carriages.
One should have been plenty. She couldn't fathom why he'd gone to the trouble of summoning two.
Karsein was the one who'd arranged them.
Which meant... was he planning to bring someone else along?
I suppose that's possible. Camilla, maybe... Yeah. That could be it.
She'd heard that ladies from other houses sometimes prepared a separate carriage for their attendants. Thinking of it that way, it wasn't really so strange.
After all, Karsein had been talking with Camilla in the study quite often lately.
In the meantime, Karsein stepped forward to the carriage and opened the door.
The moment Flora realized this was preparation to escort a noble lady, she scurried over and seized his hand.
The escort was endlessly smooth. No—smooth didn't cover it. It was flawless.
Flora was on the small side, and with a height gap this large, she usually had a shorter attendant escort her to make up for the inconvenience.
That Karsein's escort had not a single rough edge meant he was accommodating her this carefully—watching her, adjusting to her, every step of the way.
"...Did you learn that because of your fiancée?"
"What?"
"The escort. Did you learn it for your fiancée? You never used to know how."
"Yeah. Learned a lot of things, one way or another."
"..."
Something about him admitting it so readily left a bad taste in Flora's mouth.
"What are you doing?! If the escort's done, we should be leaving already! We're going to be late at this rate!"
And so, the pointless tantrum.
With some inexplicable, sour feeling rising in her chest, Flora climbed into the carriage.
"...?!"
The door suddenly swung shut.
Without a word—Karsein had closed it himself.
Flora shot up from her seat and flung the door back open.
"W-wait a moment!"
"What?"
"Why aren't you getting in...? We're going together, aren't we?"
Going together, but not riding in the same carriage?
Then surely—was he just pretending to come along? She bolted out of the carriage at once.
But Karsein wore the look of a man who saw no problem whatsoever.
"That's exactly why you ride in that one—because we're going together,"
he replied.
"W-wasn't that one prepared for the servants? You know, Camilla and such."
"Why would I bring Camilla to a tea party you asked me to attend? Same goes for anyone else."
"...Then don't tell me—you prepared two carriages because you're planning to ride separately from me?"
No. That couldn't be it.
There was no way. No matter how much he hated her, riding in a separate carriage was—
"You already know the answer. Why ask?"
At those icy words, something in the blonde girl's chest immediately grew heavy and stifled.
A feeling of being clogged up, blocked solid. That one sentence brought with it a suffocating frustration beyond all words.
"Ugh...!"
Watching Karsein board the carriage directly behind hers, Flora climbed straight back down from her own.
Then she hurried over to the door of his carriage with quick little steps.
"Heron! Open this carriage! I'm riding in this one!"
"...As you wish, my lady."
The carriage door opened in Heron's hand.
Karsein sat in the seat, reading a book. The moment the door opened, his eyes met Flora's—but without the slightest hint of displeasure, he simply turned another page.
"I'm riding in this carriage!"
"Suit yourself."
Flora shouted it with her lips pressed into a tight line, but Karsein only scoffed, his eyes never leaving the book.
Even with Heron's help boarding the carriage, somehow her mood only soured further.
Before long the carriage began to move, and still Karsein said nothing at all.
For no good reason, it was Flora whose temper frayed first, and she ended up speaking before she could stop herself.
"One carriage would have been fine, so why call two?! It just makes more work for the servants!"
"Well. I doubt there's a single soul in the ducal house who thinks you and I are on good terms."
"...!"
"Ah, though there are a few of the newer maids who wouldn't know. So not nobody—a few, I suppose. Honestly, even that's reason enough that calling two carriages wouldn't be strange, would it? And even setting that aside, I have far more memories of us fighting than getting along, so either way, two carriages were necessary."
Her fist clenched tight, as if to deny it.
He wasn't wrong.
So why did it grate on her this badly?
She wanted to deny it. No—she had to deny it.
"No! You're wrong! You've got it all wrong! One carriage would've been perfectly fiiiine!"
This wasn't why she'd brought Karsein along. Not to yell at him like this.
She hadn't climbed into a carriage with him planning to snap and shout the whole way there.
And yet there she was, lips jutting out in a pout, unmistakably the Flora Bagrand of the past.
"Ugh...! You stupid, blockheaded idiot!"
From the very first step, everything had already come hopelessly unravelled.