You Don't Know Until It's Taken
"Would you raise your arm just a little, Your Highness?"
The tailor who had come from the capital was drenched in sweat. For an entire hour the wedding gown had not advanced even a finger's width. Because Elysee refused to lift her arm.
"Your Highness..."
"That will be all for today."
"But the schedule until the wedding... The imperial family receives progress reports every fortnight..."
"I said that will be all."
The tailor stood there with the needle between his lips, on the verge of tears. The head maid dismissed him with a glance and carefully brought in tea.
"My lady. This is the third time. Rumors are already spreading through the capital."
"Let them spread."
"My lady."
"Every time a pin goes into that fabric, it feels as if a nail is being driven into me. When this dress is finished, I..."
Elysee broke off. When this dress is finished, I will become the crown princess.
Until two months ago the sentence had meant nothing to her. A marriage appropriate to her station, connections the North required, the heir's duty. The calculation had been flawless. There had been only one variable left out.
That at the end of that calculation, he would no longer be there.
Afternoon brought a mountain of documents requiring her seal. Lists of wedding gifts, guest registers, procession routes. Elysee flipped through them rapidly until her hand stopped on one page.
It was the security plan for the wedding procession. A deployment chart of the royal guard was attached.
Her fingers moved of their own accord, tracing the roster. Top to bottom. Then bottom to top again.
The name she sought could not possibly be there.
For ten years the first line of every procession security plan had carried the same name.
Exclusive escort knight Kyle. Close-quarters placement.
Approval had always been a matter of confirming that first line. If it was there, the rest of the document could be ignored.
This was the first plan that lacked it.
"...The close-protection slot is vacant."
"Four imperial guards will rotate through the duty... Your Highness?"
"Four people."
Elysee closed the file.
"Four men to do what one man used to do."
The head maid was perceptive enough not to ask what she meant by that.
Dinner was taken alone with her father. Gregor carved his meat and asked no questions. Not about the search, not about the gown, not about the banquet. That silence was more terrifying than any reprimand.
Her father was a man who knew everything; his silence meant he already possessed the answers.
Only as the meal ended did Gregor speak a single sentence.
"I reviewed the border patrol reports. The patrols seem heavily weighted toward the south lately."
"...It is because of the demonic beast activity."
"Yes. Demonic beast activity."
The Grand Duke emptied his wine cup and rose. At the door, with his back to her, he added as though to himself,
"The habit of counting only after something is lost is difficult to break. I was the same when I lost your mother."
Elysee could offer no reply to that retreating back.
Her father had already concluded that she had lost him.
"His Highness the Crown Prince has arrived."
Leonard said he was returning to the capital. Seated across from her in the receiving room, he looked exactly as he had at the banquet two weeks earlier. Polished smile, etiquette measured to the inch, speech like silk.
"I hear the tailoring is proceeding slowly."
"There are many affairs in the North."
"I imagine there are. I also hear the knight order has been quite busy. Border patrols have increased noticeably."
Elysee deliberately relaxed the hand holding her teacup so it would not tremble. They were not patrols. They were searches. And this man knew it.
"The demonic beasts have grown more active."
"Ah, demonic beasts. So I have heard. The South is in an uproar as well, they say."
Leonard took a sip of tea and casually laid down his next card.
"Have you found that escort of yours?"
"...Your Highness."
"I ask out of concern. The man who so brutally humiliated my fiancée in the middle of the banquet hall and then vanished is still roaming free. It is also a question of the imperial family's dignity."
"He is a servant of the Grand Duchy. It is not a matter for the imperial family to trouble itself over."
"A servant."
Leonard set his teacup down. It made no sound. This man even calculated the noise a cup should make.
"Elysee. Let us be honest with each other. I have no interest in why you are searching for him. Whether you catch him and sever his head or place him behind you once more is your affair. But let me make one thing clear."
The smile remained, yet for the first time his eyes did not smile.
"Settle the matter before the wedding. There is no place behind the crown princess for another man."
"He was an escort. For ten years, nothing more."
"Are half the knights of the North stationed along the border to search for 'nothing more'?"
"Then be honest with me, Your Highness. What you require from this marriage is not me but the North's sword. You simply dislike the thought of that sword wavering, do you not?"
"I will not deny it."
Leonard did not blink. Shamelessness, when sufficiently refined, apparently became elegance.
"Half the empire is upheld by the North's military strength. I am marrying that strength, and you are marrying the authority of the imperial family. An excellent transaction. And when one's trading partner's storehouse falls into disorder, it is only good manners to take a look inside."
"I will manage the storehouse myself."
"I sincerely hope you do."
The reply came a fraction late. Leonard accepted that fraction with a smile.
"Very well. Should you find yourself short of hands, simply say the word. The Imperial Information Bureau will assist you. They recognize no borders; they can locate a single person in the South or anywhere else within three days."
"I decline."
"The offer remains open. Anytime."
Leonard rose and offered a bow at a perfect angle. Then, at the door, as though that had been his purpose from the beginning, he added lightly,
"Ah, one more thing. About that man's sword. There is talk that the iron blade he wore at the banquet was merely camouflage and that he possesses another—the real one. A Grey Blade, an ancient piece, I am told. Have you ever seen it?"
"...I have no idea what you are talking about."
"If you do not, then there is no problem. Farewell."
Only after the door had closed did Elysee realize that cold sweat had soaked the back of her dress.
A grey blade. She had never seen such a sword. She had kept him at her back for ten years and had never seen it.
Yet how had the crown prince learned of it? What exactly was the Imperial Information Bureau unearthing about him?
For the first time she pictured the theft in concrete terms. The imperial family finding him first. That postscript calling him interesting. The short life span of anything that caught the crown prince's interest.
She had to hurry.
That night sleep still refused to come, and suddenly she remembered the winter two years earlier. The winter Lady Rosalyn had stayed.
She had been the daughter of a southern border count. She had come to the Grand Duke's castle for three months of social training, but from the second week her eyes had changed. Her gaze kept drifting to one place.
Behind Elysee.
"What is that escort's name?"
When Rosalyn asked at the tea gathering, Elysee had doubted her own ears. No noblewoman asked an escort's name. One did not ask the name of a piece of furniture.
"I do not recall."
"My goodness. I heard you have kept him for ten years."
"..."
"He seems curt, but he is actually very kind. Last time in the garden when I stumbled, he caught me so quickly."
That night Elysee could not sleep. At the time she had not known the name of that insomnia. No—she had not tried to know it.
Three days later Rosalyn headed toward the training grounds carrying an embroidered handkerchief. Elysee followed—by chance, she told herself it was by chance.
"Please accept this. It is my heart."
Kyle did not take the handkerchief.
"I am sorry, my lady. An escort does not accept personal items while on duty."
"Then after duty ends?"
"Even then, I remain an escort."
It was a courteous, heartless, perfect refusal.
Rosalyn ran off in tears. At that moment what filled Elysee's chest was, shamefully, relief.
And because that relief shamed her, anger followed. Anger required an outlet.
It should have ended there. Kyle had done nothing wrong. Elysee had seen that clearly with her own eyes.
Yet that evening the words that left her lips were these:
"There has been a report that the escort was seen associating privately with our guest. One month of confinement. During that time he will stand night watch on the outer wall."
It was the middle of winter. Outer-wall duty was so harsh that even knights drew lots to avoid it.
Kyle asked no questions. He offered no excuses. He simply answered,
"Understood."
Rosalyn did not stay the full three months.
On the day she left, before stepping into the carriage, she gave Elysee a perfectly courteous farewell, then added with the smallest of smiles,
"Your Highness cherishes him a great deal."
"...What do you mean?"
"My handkerchief was refused, yet he received the punishment. One tends to become angry when others touch what one cherishes."
After the carriage departed Elysee stood in that spot for a long time.
What had been obvious even to an eighteen-year-old girl's eyes, she alone had pretended not to see.
When he returned a month later, the backs of his hands bore frostbite scars.
Elysee saw them and pretended she had not. Because an apology would have required an explanation, and the reason lay in a place she herself did not wish to examine.
Now she knew the name of that reason.
It had been jealousy.
One handkerchief had overturned her insides, and she had punished a man who had not even accepted it. She had punished him even after watching him refuse with her own eyes.
Not because she hated Rosalyn. Because she feared the day might come when he would accept someone's handkerchief. She had wanted to sear that very possibility away with frostbite.
People say you do not know until it is taken from you. That is a lie.
She had known before it was taken. She had known, and still done what she did.
She had only pretended not to know because knowing was terrifying.
The Grand Duke's heir and a commoner escort—if she completed that sentence, the entire calculation of her life would collapse.
So she had protected the calculation and discarded the person.
And now the calculation had collapsed anyway, and the person was gone.
At dawn Elysee rose from her bed and went to her office. Walter and Rolf were summoned. Neither seemed surprised by the late-night call. Lately the Grand Duke's daughter's nights were longer than her days.
"The crown prince is investigating Kyle."
Walter's eyebrows twitched. Rolf wore the expression of a man who had already known.
"If the Imperial Information Bureau moves, they will be faster than us. They have agents in the South. We are bound to the border."
"Your Highness. What do you intend to do?"
Elysee unfolded the map on her desk. The southern highways were marked in red ink. The trail that had gone cold at Trent. The three roads branching out from there.
"We change the nature of the search. No more knight-order patrols. We will send covert tracking teams across the border with concealed identities. Make contact with southern merchant guilds. Hire the mercenary guild in the free city. I will use my personal fortune."
"Your Highness, if an unsanctioned border search becomes known to the imperial family—"
"Then we find him before it becomes known."
"Who will lead the tracking team? Once outside the border, any revealed identity leaves no room for excuses. Ordinary courage will not suffice—"
"I will go."
It was Walter. Rolf frowned.
"If the vice commander leaves his post, what becomes of the knight order?"
"I have three capable subordinates. Besides."
Walter hesitated, then chose his words carefully.
"Someone who knows that fellow's face must go. A portrait will not work. You saw him on the highway. Even if he stood before your eyes, you would not recognize him. That is the kind of man he is."
Elysee studied Walter for a long moment. The man who had shared the same training ground with Kyle for ten years. She could now read that the gaze he turned on her contained more than mere loyalty.
"...Form a team of five. All in civilian clothes."
"Yes, Your Highness."
Elysee lifted her eyes from the map. Walter closed his mouth at what he saw there. They were the eyes she wore in the training yard. The eyes of someone who believed she would rather die than lose.
"Find that escort. Use every ounce of the North's strength if you must."
And staring out the window into the darkness—into the South that lay beyond it—she added,
"Before the imperial family does."