The Proposal (2)
She looked up at me with frightened eyes.
I already knew exactly what to say to a girl like that.
"Right. Contact your mother at once and have her send a ransom of three thousand gold coins—"
—No. That wasn't it.
Habit. Pure habit.
Normally, being stuck in a maze for six hours doesn't make someone leap straight to I've been kidnapped. Our family, however, had done Elizabeth an enormous favor when it came to objective situation assessment.
The Vargas Duchy is one enormous island. To keep foreign powers out we maintained a navy far larger than any sensible nation needed, which left my ancestors with a recurring headache.
"Our navy is too big. Maintenance is bleeding us dry. Ideas?"
"Cut the soldiers' pay…?"
"Reduce the number of warships…?"
"Or we just take the surplus navy, plunder a few coastlines, kidnap some nobles, and collect the ransoms?"
The third speaker was named Outstanding Noble of the Year.
And that was how piracy became the family business. The trade flourished; our reputation for "services rendered" spread across the continent. Of course, problems arose.
"The Empire is cracking down. Sigh… What's a small businessman like me supposed to eat?"
Neighboring kingdoms and the Empire itself started squeezing our livelihood. The ancestors gathered again, faces grave.
"Anyone got an idea? Maybe… we have to give up piracy…"
Three generations of hard-won tradition were about to be ripped away. Eyes grew damp. Then one noble stepped forward.
"I have a brilliant plan."
"Oh! Speak."
"First we plunder more and stockpile the money."
"And then?"
"Use that money to expand the army."
"And then?"
"The neighbors will start complaining even louder, right?"
"Naturally."
"So we use the army we just built!"
"Oh."
That man also won Outstanding Noble of the Year. Thus the plunder-army-war-plunder cycle (repeat indefinitely) was perfected, and the family survived both scorn and persecution.
Anyway—because of that proud family tradition, Lady Elizabeth had concluded she was currently being kidnapped. A perfectly rational suspicion, really.
"You—you scoundrel! I am a princess of a sovereign nation! Do you think you can kidnap me and walk away unscathed?!"
She shouted with admirable spirit. I started toward her to clear up the misunderstanding, and—
"I take it back! I take it back! D-don't hit me!"
I hadn't realized words came with a cancel option.
Regardless, roughly twenty minutes of patient explanation calmed her down.
"Oh. So I wasn't kidnapped."
"Of course not."
"Then… why have I been stuck in this maze for six hours?"
Fair question. I already had the perfect excuse ready.
"I got lost as well."
"…Pardon? This is your house, Sir Henry."
"The maze is simply that large."
She worked her mouth for a moment, then managed a single word.
"…Liar."
As a princess of a nation she couldn't quite bring herself to swear.
After hours of walking, tension, and emotional whiplash, she was spent. She flopped straight onto her back.
"I don't know what you're playing at, but—haah—I can't take another step."
I sat down beside her. She shot me a sidelong glance, then spoke again.
"Is there anything to drink? My throat is burning. Someone's fault."
I did feel a modest twinge of guilt. When had a princess ever walked for six straight hours? Still, what was I supposed to find to drink in the middle of a hedge maze—
Ah.
There was one source. The pair of lovers I'd stumbled across earlier, hard at work producing the next generation of heirs. I distinctly remembered several bottles of wine sitting next to them.
Probably started with atmosphere and a little wine, and things escalated from there.
"I'll fetch one, then. Wait just a moment."
"All right."
Leaving the obediently waiting girl behind, I headed back toward the lovers' nest. I worried she might run, of course, but—
I can't exactly tie her down.
Pretending to be lost and circling the same paths was a prank. Actually forcing her to stay would be genuine kidnapping. And she was exhausted; where would she find the strength to—
—Oh, she found it.
In the brief time it took me to grab the wine, I spotted her far ahead, stumbling along at a desperate jog. Decent stamina, at least. Shame about the direction she chose.
"Wh-what—?"
She stared at me with a blank, stupid look after looping right back around.
"If you run that way, you end up here again."
"Th-then this way!"
She bolted in the opposite direction. That route, unfortunately—
"…Huh."
After a long sprint she was back in front of me once more. A maze isn't called a maze for nothing.
"Care to try one more time?"
"Then just one last—"
She stopped mid-sentence, glanced at another corridor, then let out a long sigh and dropped down beside me.
"—That's wine, isn't it? Just give me a drink."
The wine was high-grade, which meant it was far stronger than expected. She had asked for it so casually I assumed she'd drunk before. She had not. Naturally, she got thoroughly drunk.
"I really thought I'd been kidnapped."
Her diction was still clear, but her energy was sky-high and her face was flushed bright red. She kept talking without any particular order.
"Father always used to scare me—‘If you keep misbehaving, the Vargas brutes will come snatch you up!'—so I was terrified…"
That severe, was it? Granted, we did perform frequent "involuntary relocation and return-fee collection" operations against the Lancart Kingdom, but it wasn't as if we were the boogeyman under the bed.
"Now that you're here, though, it's just a place where people live, isn't it?"
"Yeees, that's true. Of course all I've done since arriving is wander around a maze… I really wanted to see the banquet hall too."
She sneezed once and pressed on.
"I wanted to walk around the hall, dance with strangers, whisper secrets in the garden… Wait. I'm already whispering secrets right now. Hehe."
"I suspect ‘whispering secrets' means something else."
The kind of conversation you have with your body, not your mouth.
"Huh? Something else? What else is there?"
"Princess. How old are you?"
"Seventeen this year."
"I'll tell you when you're a little older."
"A little older…? Ah—does ‘whispering secrets' mean…?"
Her already wine-flushed face turned an even deeper scarlet. Pure as driven snow, this one.
She toppled backward onto the grass. Not because she'd passed out—more like she wanted to hide that burning face.
"Even if it isn't the banquet hall, this is nice too. Lying like this, you can see the night sky."
"The night sky looks the same no matter where you view it from, doesn't it?"
"The feeling is completely different! Looking at it from our palace and looking at it here—it's not the same at all!"
If you say so. I'd sailed half the continent on pirate business and the night sky was the night sky. The particular stars changed a little, maybe.
I looked down at her. Lying back had pulled her dress taut; the figure it revealed was, well, substantial.
Elizabeth Tudor. Princess of the Lancart Kingdom. Normally a beautiful princess is a national treasure, plastered all over every diplomatic brochure. Yet I had never once heard that Lancart possessed a beauty of this caliber as its princess.
Even though we're neighboring countries.
Noble daughters often debut in society in their early teens. That a princess of a nation had never attended a single banquet until the age of seventeen was suspicious. And her first banquet wasn't even in her own country—it was a foreign one. My father hadn't invited her either, as far as I knew. How she had even gotten here remained a mystery.
So something had to be off… except watching her grin idiotically at the constellations, she looked like nothing more than an ordinary girl. An ordinary noble young lady drowning in sentiment.
"Sir Henry."
"Yes?"
"Propose to me."
"…What?"
Correction. She was extremely strange.
I did plan to marry, yes. I did plan to propose, yes. If I didn't marry immediately, Lady Roent was waiting for me with open arms—but that was my problem, not hers. I couldn't make sense of this.
"I don't understand why you're suddenly asking that."
"It's complicated to explain. But if I have to put it simply… do you believe in destiny?"
Ah. So she was an ordinary girl after all. A girl whose romantic sensibility had overflowed, looped around, and short-circuited.
Only that level of teenage sentimentality would reach for the word "destiny."
"I don't believe in destiny."
"Oh, you don't…? That's a problem… If you don't believe in it I'll have to give a long, boring, scholarly explanation…"
She seemed to be deciding where to start. The moment she opened her mouth—
"There you are. Please come with us."
Soldiers of my house flooded the path. They announced they would be returning Princess Elizabeth to her homeland at once and began to lead her away. I tried to stop them, but the moment they said it was the Duke's order I had no choice but to shut my mouth.
As they dragged her off, I shouted after her with complete sincerity.
"I will propose!"
I had no other candidates anyway, and even if her romantic streak was alarming, her personality didn't seem rotten.
"—You have to!"
Her answer floated back like an echo from far away.
And that was how we parted—on a thoroughly unsettling note. I hauled my drunken body toward the banquet hall.
"My, where did you manage to get so thoroughly soused?"
Lady Roent was already moving in to corner me. The butler reached me first, propped me up, and steered me straight to my chambers.
This butler fellow is remarkably competent. No wonder Father values him.
I don't remember much after that.
I have a vague recollection of ordering the butler—rather forcefully—to send a proposal letter. Beyond that, nothing.
I'm just… so sleepy.
And so, that very night, a single letter was dispatched to the Lancart Kingdom.
A proposal from Henry von Vargas—addressed to Mary Tudor.