The Stolen Seat
As expected, Count Wilden folded the moment Count Bronovich appeared, as if he had been the one insisting all along that Owen should be removed at once.
Of course, the count apologized with impeccable manners and promised compensation if any damage had been done. But no one was foolish enough to hold out a hand and demand an actual fortune in return. It was far more profitable to use this as leverage and ask for a continuing friendship instead.
Only after everything had been settled, Owen said, was he finally released from the prison—because the count had declared that he would be taking his uncle with him.
But they really didn’t look alike at all.
That was what the knight who had been present when Owen and Count Bronovich met had said.
According to him, Owen had looked thoroughly startled the moment he entered the count’s chamber, while Count Bronovich’s face had made his disgust impossible to hide. From the suffocating atmosphere alone, it sounded as if their relationship was every bit as dreadful as she had imagined.
Well, of course. He can’t exactly be pleased to have an uncle who was born from his grandmother’s affair and is practically young enough to be his own child.
And yet there was something odd about it. For all his displeasure, the count had shown up here in person, almost as if he were advertising the fact to the whole world. He could have handled everything quietly, without exposing himself at all. Instead, he had come to the knight order as if he wanted everyone to know where Owen came from.
He’d ignored him until now, so why suddenly come all the way here? Could it be that Owen had become necessary after all?
For someone of Count Bronovich’s standing, the only reason he might need a young man like Owen would be for the gains that came with marriage. It was widely known that the count’s son had chased love and married a woman of modest rank.
I’m not very good at defying other people’s expectations. Maybe that’s because I grew up without being loved.
In that cramped room, Sylvia remembered Owen casually laying bare his own weakness. His blond hair catching the sunlight as it poured through the window. The scent of dust in the filthy room, and the faint smell of soap on him, clean and plain-clothed as he was.
If he wasn’t good at going against expectations, did that mean that even if the count demanded he marry another woman, he still wouldn’t be able to refuse?
Lost in these tangled thoughts, Sylvia shook them off and tried to sleep.
What happened to Owen had nothing to do with her. She already had enough on her plate with Heston alone.
* * *
“Good heavens, miss! Your face is a disaster!”
Whether she had slept poorly or simply woken up looking drawn, Alicia threw a fit the moment Sylvia opened her eyes.
“Even so, you don’t have to come right out and call me a disaster the second I wake up….”
As Sylvia rubbed at her heavy eyelids and sat up, Alicia kept up her stream of chatter while briskly getting to work, dressing her from head to toe.
“What am I supposed to do when you really do look a mess?”
She wiped Sylvia’s face with warm water.
“You weren’t up all night because of something that happened at the knight order, were you?”
She braided her hair up neatly and pinned it in place, then drew out the side strands with practiced hands to make everything look tidy.
“Last time, you even had your chin dyed blue. So what is it this time? Is somebody bullying you?”
The freshly pressed uniform smelled warm and soft. Sylvia let Alicia take her arms and legs as she pleased, marveling once again at how Alicia could talk without pause and still move so efficiently. But even that, too, was nice. When she had gone out on dispatches, she had had to wash herself alone, shivering in the cold from all directions.
No. In my case, it was still better. Heston even drew the water for me, and mixed in some warm water too.
Looking at his hands reddened by the cold, Sylvia had wanted to stop fussing over him and simply share some warmth from her own hands instead of saying, “Are you okay? You didn’t need to do that… thank you, I’ll use it well.”
By now, though, it was all meaningless.
As she took her medicine out of habit and swallowed it, Alicia watched silently for a moment, then narrowed her eyes suspiciously.
“Haven’t you been taking that medicine for too long? What on earth is it?”
“I told you. Back then….”
“You’re saying it’s because your body went strange from the magic the young master put on you? But usually that kind of thing gets better in three or four days, doesn’t it?”
“It does?”
Where on earth had she heard something like that? Startled, Sylvia answered with a stupid question before she could stop herself. Alicia didn’t miss the crack in her voice. She straightened her chest and held up the earring she’d been carrying in her hand.
“Yes. But you’ve been taking that medicine for more than a week already. Isn’t it some kind of suspicious drug?”
“It isn’t.”
“You’re acting awfully shady, you know. At this rate, I might just steal some of it one day and take it to a doctor.”
“How can you say you’re going to steal it so confidently?”
“If it’s a perfectly normal medicine, then you shouldn’t need to hide it.”
Without saying anything, Sylvia stuffed every last pill away into her pocket. Alicia stared at the pocket for a long moment, then snorted as if she were the one doing Sylvia a favor and clipped the earring onto her ear.
The ruby-colored jewel, shaped like a pomegranate seed and filled with mana, flashed briefly as it settled against Sylvia’s ear.
* * *
Because she had been ordered to report directly to the commander’s office, Sylvia headed there the moment she got out of the carriage.
She habitually straightened her clothes, then knocked on the door. It opened almost at once, as if someone had been waiting for her.
The first thing she saw was Heston’s back, standing with his hands clasped behind him in front of the commander’s desk. He was still in armor, and Sylvia could tell from his posture alone just how bad his mood was.
What had happened? He’d seemed perfectly fine when they parted yesterday.
“Ah, Appleton. Come in.”
The commander greeted her with a wave of his hand. Sylvia bowed her head briefly in acknowledgment, then went to stand beside Heston.
Apparently this was to be a private conversation, because the servant who had opened the door immediately withdrew. Sylvia tried not to think too much of it and gave Heston a light nudge from beside him, but either he hadn’t noticed or he was deliberately pretending not to. He remained in the same stubborn, half-bowed posture, not looking her way.
The commander gave a short, awkward cough, as though something embarrassing had happened, then got straight to the point.
“I need you to go on the next dispatch. As you know, because of that panty incident—no, because of Owen harassing the knights, we’ve got a few vacancies. Wilden and the others are throwing a fit and saying they won’t go. Owen will be going to clean up the mess, of course, and Lockwood will….”
By then, the commander had looked back toward Heston again. Sylvia found it strange not so much that the commander was also calling it the panty incident, but that he seemed to be watching Heston’s reaction.
Is this not settled between them yet? But Heston would never refuse an order to go on dispatch.
“Ahem. Lockwood will be going too, naturally. Isn’t that right?”
“…….”
After the commander’s smug, self-important words, an awkward silence followed. Sylvia glanced at Heston’s face, rigid enough to be frightening, then stepped in as though to save the commander from himself.
“When you say dispatch, do you mean the one to Alzen?”
“That’s right. There are plenty of knights there already, so it shouldn’t be too hard a trip.”
Alzen was the territory in the southeastern borderlands, adjoining the kingdom of Ekevich, where the prince’s fiancée came from. It was guarded by Duke Araspe, the emperor’s in-law and the prince’s maternal grandfather, and she knew the area was heavily protected to secure the trade route with Ekevich.
This time, the dispatch was merely to investigate reports from local residents who claimed they had seen monsters, along with indications that the monsters might have established a base. Even if there really were monsters and they had made a nest, it was obvious they would still be at an early stage and not yet dangerous.
Sylvia wanted to ask why she and Heston needed to go to such a place at all, but the commander would only accuse her of questioning his judgment, so she swallowed the words.
“Yes. I’ll make preparations.”
At her obedient answer, the commander’s expression eased, as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
“We leave tomorrow, so I’m sorry for the short notice. There’s one more thing I need to tell you….”
Then Sylvia heard the sharp grind of Heston’s teeth as he clenched his jaw. Startled, she looked at him, and saw the strain in the line of his jaw and the white-knuckled grip of the hand behind his back.
The commander ignored Heston on purpose and said shamelessly, “I don’t think there’s any need for Heston to have a Supporter on this trip. Instead, I’d like you to take Owen.”
He said it so casually that Sylvia almost nodded as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
But her expression had already broken apart by the time she could stop it, and she asked, “Why?”
He was talking as if a partner relationship could simply be cut away and reattached whenever convenient.
Surely a commander ought to understand how important the partnership between a knight and a Supporter was. Unless he’d gone mad?
Now she understood why Heston had been in such a foul mood from the beginning.
“What’s that look supposed to mean? Are you refusing my order?”
“If you don’t give me a proper reason….”
Even under the commander’s oppressive voice, Sylvia did not back down. The commander’s eyes widened, and he clearly struggled to keep his temper in check.
“Damn it all, you’ve picked up a few medals and suddenly think you’re untouchable? If the order doesn’t suit you, you won’t follow it? I’m still your superior. If I tell you to go somewhere, you go there—even if it’s a road to death. I’ve already gone out of my way to consider your positions, and even that has limits. Do you think I’m a joke?”
Like the useless superiors who had nothing to say for themselves, he was simply crushing everything down under the weight of authority. The sound of a file being slammed onto the desk rang out sharply. She wasn’t a child, and she had long since grown too old to be frightened by that sort of behavior.
Sylvia stepped forward, ready to argue back, but Heston suddenly reached out and barred her way.
“All right, enough.”
It was hard to believe those words had come from Heston, who normally kept rank so strictly. But what shocked Sylvia more was that he had said all right. Even when she turned to stare at him in furious confusion, Heston did not move. He only kept looking at the commander.
The commander glared at him, face reddening, then jerked around and muttered loudly, “Why the hell is he getting mad at me over the mess he made? If he’s already engaged, he should’ve handled it himself.”
That only left Sylvia more bewildered. Engaged? Did that mean all of this had been decided by order of Princess Catherine?
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