One Room, Two Beds
The gate of Baron Beara's territory—a domain belonging to the Altair Dukedom—came into view before us.
People arriving in all manner of carriages were lined up waiting for inspection, so I figured it would take quite a while. Leaning back at my ease, I turned my head to the side.
Aria was dozing against the window, her eyes closed.
She might be a mage, but her body was that of an ordinary woman. All the fatigue she'd been carrying had probably come crashing down at once the moment she realized she could finally rest.
"Why?"
Whether she'd noticed my gaze or not, Aria opened her eyes, quietly held mine, and sat up.
"Move over."
Then she shoved me sideways, sprawled out into the space she'd cleared, and laid her head on my lap. Her uncharacteristic petulance flustered me a little, but watching her close her eyes and breathe softly, I found myself smiling faintly and reaching out with practiced ease to stroke her beautiful platinum hair.
Once we cleared the inspection at the gate and entered, I carried the deeply sleeping Aria on my back and stepped down from the carriage.
"Has Her Highness fallen asleep?"
"Yes. I'll carry her, so don't worry. Everyone, take the rest of the day off and rest well."
"But—"
"There won't be any ambushes within the territory, and my identity as a prince is hidden anyway. You needn't worry."
"Then, if you'll excuse our rudeness."
Having dismissed the knights, I headed in the opposite direction—toward the inn.
Perhaps because my body was swaying with each step, before long the Aria on my back flinched and began to stir.
"...We're inside the walls?"
I answered her through the written dialogue I hadn't needed to use today.
"We just came in."
Now that she was awake, she could have gotten down, but Aria stayed rooted to my back. It wasn't as if I was struggling, so I kept walking, pushed open the inn's door, and stepped inside.
"Two single rooms for one night, please."
"I'm sorry, customer, but we only have one single room left."
"Is that so?"
A bit of a problem.
This upscale inn was the only one of its kind in Baron Beara's territory. The rest were the sort of places with nothing but a bed and a blanket—somewhere you slept for a few hours and moved on.
"We'll take it."
Just as I was about to give up and look elsewhere, Aria snatched the key from the innkeeper's hand. She'd been whining since we arrived that a bath came first, so the sensible thing was to give her the room and go find another inn myself. I turned to leave—but Aria reached out and grabbed me, pulled money from inside her coat, handed it to the innkeeper, and said with a strange look on her face:
"Where do you think you're going?"
"We can't share one room."
"Don't be ridiculous. When we were kids, we shared a bed just fine."
"......"
"Or is it that now, suddenly, you don't see me as your sister but as a woman?"
At those words, I decided I'd lost. With a faint sigh, I followed her into the room.
She paid me no mind whatsoever and went straight into the bathroom.
Yes—this was what a brother and sister were supposed to look like.
Afterward, when Aria emerged from the bath and I had finished my own, we lay down together on the bed.
A childhood memory resurfaced. Aria sleeping with her back to me—not a single detail different. Pure déjà vu.
The problem was that the bed was small enough that I risked falling out of it in my sleep. Proportionally speaking, we'd divided the territory of the mattress something like seven to three.
"...What are you doing. Move your hand."
The darkness was thick enough that even if I wrote something, she wouldn't be able to see it, so I gave no answer. Still, the way Aria's rear end kept pressing against the back of my hand as she lay with her back to me—that was a stretch to call accidental. With the sleeping surface this cramped, of course our bodies were going to touch.
But if I rested my hands on my stomach, my elbows jabbed into her back. In the end I tried stretching both arms up toward the ceiling, but there was no way I could sleep like that, so finally, facing Aria's back, I rolled onto my side and pulled her into my arms.
She jolted.
What was I doing?
Without a word, Aria slowly twisted her head back in the darkness. I couldn't make out her eyes properly, but I had no doubt she was glaring at me, her lovely brows knit tight.
I kept my silence and buried my face into the pillow beside her head, closing my eyes. Then she twisted her head away—apparently disliking the feel of my breath seeping into her nape—and began tickling the bridge of my nose with her hair. I tightened my arm around her in silent instruction to hold still, and with a faint sigh, she gave up resisting.
"Creepy bastard..."
I had, in fact, tried to find another inn.
Why curse me after dragging yourself into this room of your own accord? I felt more than a little wronged, but it hardly mattered at this point, so I wrote the words good night on the back of her hand.
Despite the unfamiliar surroundings so unlike the Imperial Palace, my body—settling into an easy relief—sank before long into deep sleep.
Over ground chilled through the night, the morning breeze drifted in through the window. It was summer, but at this hour the air carried no mugginess—it was like a bell tolling the start of a rather pleasant morning.
Aria, however, was finding it hard to enjoy any of it.
Rohen lay fast asleep, pinning her down beneath a thick forearm. The moment she shifted in discomfort, that arm locked around her like a shackle. For a flicker of a second she thought it was cute, like a child too anxious to let his playmate wander off—
But when she felt the hard, rigid length of him pressed against her backside, their bodies locked tightly together, embarrassment flooded in far more than anything else. How to put it—like prey with its nape caught in a predator's bite.
Sliip.
She reached her left hand back to push the thing away from her rear, only to startle at the heat she could feel through the fabric and its hardness almost impossible to believe belonged to a human body—and hastily snatched her hand back.
Creak.
At that, Rohen finally began to wake, turning over and loosening the arm that had been holding her. Aria shot up out of the bed in a hurry, clenching and unclenching her left hand—where that vivid sensation still lingered—before marching straight into the bathroom.
"......"
Even though she was clearly dousing herself with cold water, the heat wouldn't fade. Had her body flushed this hot from shame and embarrassment alone? Or else...
"What am I even thinking..."
Sinking under a wave of self-loathing and mortification, Aria pressed her face into the cold water and closed her eyes.
After waking, I found Aria's uncharacteristic silence odd, but finished preparing and rejoined the knights at the time we'd arranged beforehand.
"We're leaving the carriages behind."
"What?"
Reading what I'd written, Aria broke the silence she'd kept all morning and spoke with a look of disbelief.
"If we want to draw them in, we have to play the merchant."
"True. Still, it'd be a waste to abandon the goods inside this carriage."
By any measure, the cargo was no small quantity.
"Mirror Flower, Water Moon."
That wasn't to say we'd go out empty-handed, of course—the disguise was necessary, just as Aria said. So when I conjured a completely identical carriage through Mirror Flower, Water Moon, the knights watched with eyes of quiet wonder. Even so, they had seen this power often enough by now that none of them looked truly surprised.
"So in the end, I'm walking too."
"Sorry."
"Forget it."
As if it didn't matter, Aria pulled her hood down deep and followed my lead. It was time to depart.
The carriage forged from Mirror Flower, Water Moon rolled forward, and beside it the knights and I walked in disguise as hired mercenaries, guarding its flanks. The illusion created by Mirror Flower, Water Moon shattered the instant someone touched it and realized it was false, so caution was essential.
"You're clear to pass."
Since I'd replicated the cargo inside as well, the inspection itself posed no difficulty. When we'd entered Baron Beara's territory yesterday and been searched, word that we were a merchant caravan from the Neutral Faction's region must have already leaked.
And with the load packed to the brim with nothing but regional specialties, we were quite literally a delectable piece of bait.
'...Will they actually attack as-is?'
Even at this early hour, two carriages were trailing behind us. They didn't look like the type to launch an ambush, though—and by their appearance, they seemed like genuinely honest merchants. With witnesses attached, I wondered whether our expectations would play out exactly as predicted, but since the original attacks had been indiscriminate precisely to avoid suspicion, I couldn't rule out the possibility entirely.
"W-what is that?!"
Sure enough, some distance into Baron Beara's territory, a strange commotion rose from behind us. Felled trees and boulders came rolling in, blocking the carriages' line of retreat.
They were things one could scrounge up easily enough from the surrounding forest—but dumping such quantities in one place meant someone had prepared in advance and been lying in wait.
Crash!
Just as expected, before long the common rabble came swarming out of the brush on all sides, weapons in hand. The merchants all donned armor and pushed their hired mercenaries to the front, but even a glance was enough to see they were outnumbered. Fifty men at a rough estimate—a difference of nearly double in headcount.
"H-hey! Don't just stand there watching—join us and fight!"
The other merchants shouted over to our conspicuously untroubled group, but the attackers weren't about to wait for that moment; they moved as one, and the battle began.
"An artifact!"
Their movements alone gave them away. If these had truly been vagrants, the goods in the carriages would have been the prize. But they paid the merchants no mind whatsoever, immediately raising artifacts embedded with fire magic and taking aim at my carriage—the one woven from Mirror Flower, Water Moon.
"Wh-what—?!"
But the moment the flames touched it, the carriage vanished like a mirage.
[ Mirror Flower, Water Moon has been seen through — the power of the Lingual Command dissipates. ]
"It—it just disappeared?!"
Watching them fall into confusion, I clapped my hands to draw every eye, pulled off my hood, and loaded the Lingual Command's power into my words: