Drunken Ramblings
Emilia had been drifting in a pleasant haze, a tipsy little smile playing on her lips — until Rai's words sent ice racing down her spine and snapped her instantly, violently sober.
A matter of the utmost secrecy had just tumbled out of his mouth as if it were nothing at all. Her clouded green eyes sharpened to a razor's edge.
The banquet hall was packed with academy students, attendants, and escort knights. What in the world did this man think he was saying?
The one who shattered the suddenly frozen atmosphere was Diana, bursting into laughter.
"What, is this your first time playing, Raikkang? You can't lead with a lie that ridiculous. The whole point of this game is to spin something believable."
"Oh, that's not how you do it?"
"Nope, nope. You usually go with ordinary everyday stuff that's hard to call. Like, I like bell peppers, or I'm from such-and-such a place. Try again."
Rai nodded at Diana's explanation.
"So your next lie is 'I am Edelian'? You suck at this game."
Aslan piled on, grinning as he needled him.
The claim was so enormous that everyone present dismissed it as a joke. The only person in the room who had nearly jumped out of her skin was Emilia, who knew the truth — and once the rest of them laughed it off, Rai just tilted his head.
"I can't play? I'm pretty confident when it comes to fooling people. In that case… I…"
A man who had already deceived half the banquet hall thought it over, then opened his mouth again.
"I hate sneaky bastards."
"That's still a weird thing to say, but I'll let it slide."
Watching Rai rattle off answers that refused to be normal, Diana nodded with the air of someone doing him a favor.
"I've never met Edelian. My drinking capacity is three bottles of fifty-percent brandy. I'm from the Brett Region. That better?"
"Good, good. Now we just have to pick out the truths."
Diana nodded and lined up glasses in front of Rai. A mischievous smile on her face, she filled them halfway with hard liquor. It was the kind of drink you normally poured to a quarter and sipped slowly for the aroma, so even as a penalty, it felt a little excessive.
"Ugh — can you even drink all that in one go?"
"You just have to guess right."
Diana answered Aslan's question with a sunny smile and set the bottle down.
"Whoever guesses correctly, Raikkang drinks theirs."
"What's with that handicap?"
"Games are more fun when they're stacked against you. I'm betting on the drinking capacity. Raikkang can hold his liquor."
Once Diana took the lead, the other students fell into quiet, serious thought.
After wrestling with it at length, Philia put her money on I hate sneaky bastards. Aslan shook his head.
"No way that's true."
"Why not? Honestly, hating sneaky people is so obvious it could be a trap, but then if you reverse it—"
"No. You don't need to dig that deep."
Aslan cut her off and declared it with total confidence.
"Saying he hates sneaky bastards means he hates himself too. That's self-loathing. Obviously a lie."
"…"
"…Aslan. You're actually really smart."
"You guys are killing me."
The students stared at Aslan in astonishment and praised his sudden wisdom. Philia, taking his words to heart, started thinking even harder. Diana looked delighted that at least one lie was already on the board. Rai's face twisted as he watched them — and that was when Zeroa put his stake on Edelian.
"It's definitely the most suspicious one, I'll give you that. But that one looks like a trap too. He could've just seen the guy in passing."
"Is that so? I was under the impression Instructor Rai had spent a long time overseas, so that's the one I went with."
"Oh. That actually tracks."
A man with no official record and frightening skill — plenty of the students believed he'd made his name abroad. Philia, who had been tracing that trail and suspected he might have been a mercenary, and Abigail, who already knew how fluently he slipped into a sellsword's drawl, both nodded at Zeroa's choice.
The lies were all just plausible enough to make picking one a headache. Each student trusted their own read and chose.
"Then I'll take the Brett Region."
Last of all, Emilia selected Rai's origin — the one option nobody else had touched.
"Huh? Your Highness? That's completely wrong."
"Yeah, Lia, you know that too. You can't miss people from the Brett Region with that accent of theirs."
Aslan and Diana told her she'd picked badly. Rai just grinned.
"What the hell…"
A thick, gravelly voice. A stiff, blunt cadence — and then a reckless spray of ornamental phrases that clashed with both. That was the hallmark of people from the Brett Region.
They had been a rough people to begin with, absorbed into the Empire late, and they had snatched up the refined vocabulary of the capital and used it indiscriminately. The result was a dialect all their own. There was even a joke name for it — Brett-speak — coined specifically to make fun of them. Hearing Rai unspool that Brett-speak with total fluency, Aslan let out a curse like a death rattle, unable to believe it.
"What era are you even talking about? Talk like that in the Brett Region these days and they'll call you a geezer."
Rai recited, word for word, something he had heard from Leila, and smiled in triumph.
"Whoa — I genuinely did not know that."
"He's actually from the Brett Region? No way."
Everyone was reeling. Emilia, who had chosen the truth, was smiling.
In fairness, she had only gotten it right because she already knew Rai's cover identity. She had not known he could actually speak Brett. That part had caught her off guard.
Rai gathered up the glasses of everyone who had picked a lie, along with Emilia's — she who had hit the truth — and drained them all in one go before setting them back on the table.
"Kahh. That's fucking strong."
"It feels like my insides are on fire."
"Hmm — so what's your actual drinking capacity, then, Raikkang?"
Still clinging to her own guess, Diana asked. Rai shrugged.
"One bottle of brandy."
"Huh. That's surprisingly little. Wait, no — it's not little, but considering the whole drunkard image, it's unexpected."
"And the part about hating sneakiness?"
This time Philia cut in.
"I like it. If they've got no skill and they're sneaky, it's fun to mess with them. If they actually have skill, it's satisfying as hell to smash them to pieces."
"Whoa. What a nasty personality."
Anyone who knew Rai's temperament would have found it a refreshingly obvious answer. Philia didn't even have a scrap of regret left to hold onto.
He gave each of them a fitting reply about the lies they had chosen, and they played two more rounds after that. Time after time, they failed to see through Rai's sly fabrications, and time after time they were the ones who had to drink. In the end Emilia got caught too. She knocked back the hard liquor, started listing badly, and Jane — her escort knight — had no choice but to gather her up and carry her to the bedroom.
Leaving the students to keep drinking among themselves, Rai followed Jane out and fell into step beside her.
"It's Jane, right? Sorry for getting Emil— the Princess so drunk."
"Please, feel free to just call me Jane, Instructor."
Having asked him to drop the formality, Jane glanced down for a moment at Emilia in her arms. She looked at her the way a parent looks at a child, with real affection in her eyes, then lifted her head and offered Rai her thanks.
"I'm the one who should be thanking you, Instructor. This is the first time Princess Emilia has ever gotten drunk."
Rai couldn't quite see how getting her drunk was something to be praised for, but Jane even bowed her head.
"Her Highness drank heavily exactly once, just to confirm her own limit, and has never truly drunk since."
"Because it's dangerous?"
At Rai's question, Jane gave a bitter smile and nodded.
Emilia was surrounded by enemies on every side. She always had to keep her wits about her. She could not afford a weakened body, and she could not afford to be drunk. There was no telling when her own siblings would make a move, so her nerves were always drawn taut.
"This is the first time I've seen Her Highness let her guard down like this. She must trust you a great deal."
"Well. I am pretty reliable."
"Hahaha. So it would seem. Her Highness did say that right now is the safest she's ever been."
Even Rai's shameless reply earned a laugh and an agreement from Jane.
She had worried when Emilia announced she was going to get properly drunk tonight. But Emilia had only given her a bright, clear smile and told her that today was the safest day of all, so there was nothing to worry about. She had even joked that Jane had worked hard enough to deserve a day off. Jane had tried to talk her out of that last part — but watching a woman who was always watching her own back finally, truly relax had put Jane in a good mood.
"Thank you for escorting us."
"Escort? I just walked along so you wouldn't get bored. I'll be going, then."
Rai waved in that easy way of his and, at the bedroom door, turned back toward the banquet hall.
The shout that hit him the instant he opened the door, the smell of liquor hanging in the air — the banquet had gone even further to hell, and Rai snickered.
Zeroa, who had been grabbed and held in place by Aslan, had drunk himself into a heap across the table. Abigail seemed to have taken a liking to the expensive liquor; her face was redder than before, and she was knocking it back without pause.
The attendants of high-ranking people received professional training to match. In matters of etiquette especially, they were educated thoroughly enough to take posts as instructors, and no one ever objected when they offered a guest a word of advice on manners. Etiquette was a matter of honor, so an attendant's counsel was well worth listening to.
The one time those attendants never interfered was when there was alcohol involved.
Among them, there was a famous saying: in front of a person who has been drinking, close your ears and shut your mouth. No matter how kind the temperament, no matter how fair the person, once the liquor went in, reason went out, and there was no telling what they might do. Attendants — the weaker party in the room — said nothing at all in a banquet hall. Whether someone was trampling etiquette or making a dog of themselves, they paid it no mind. They carried the drinks and the food, and they stood still.
With a hall full of thoroughly wasted students in front of him, Rai quietly called over the attendants who had been staring at the floor.
From here on, this was drunkards' territory. For anyone still sober, even watching people in this state was enough to pile on the stress, so Rai set them free. He asked them to bring a few more bottles and a little food, then sent every last one of them off duty. The attendants moved as if they had been waiting for this exact moment.
They didn't even ask if it was allowed. If anything, they seemed terrified he might call them back. They filled the tables with liquor and food at speed and vanished like smoke.
Rai sat down at a table left to the drunks and poured himself a glass.
Diana was already gone — off to her bedroom, apparently — and everyone who remained was sitting there in their own private stage of intoxication.
Diligent as ever, that one.
Rai thought of the missing Diana as he drank — and then Philia, who had been sitting apart, came staggering over and dropped into the seat beside him.
That once-upright posture had gone completely unguarded. Those once-sharp eyes were half-glazed. She stared at him blankly, and when he refilled her glass, she picked it up, drank, and let out a warm breath.
"Are you disappointed in me?"
"Disappointed about what?"
"You said you were disappointed in me. Am I disappointing? Am I a disappointment?"
Listening to Philia repeat herself in a drunken loop, Rai turned to the others with open irritation.
"Hey. Someone get her to a bedroom."
"…"
"…"
"Right. You're all very busy, I see."
Aslan was locked in a staring contest with a pillar. Abigail was drinking in silence, except that half of it was spilling and the other half was going over the back of her head. Rai gave up.
"Don't you ignore meeee — is it because I'm a disappointmeeent?"
"Ghk — hey, let go. Don't put me in a chokehold while you're acting cute."
It looked like a sweet little drunken cling. It was not. Philia had wrapped herself around him from behind, and a body that had repeated the motion thousands of times moved on its own, locking down his throat. Her arm was hooked around his neck in a solid choke. He hit her arm and told her to let go; she only squeezed tighter and refused to yield.
It was a hug that made his heart pound for an entirely different reason. Rai barely wrenched himself free, gasping, and peeled her off him.
"Noooo — I wanna stay with youuuu—"
The moment he pushed her face away, she lunged as if she still wanted to hold him, and in the end she ended up draped over him, her head resting on his thigh. Then she went quiet.
Listening to the soft sound of her breathing, Rai sighed and drank liquor in long swallows, the way other people drank water.
He looked around the banquet hall again. He was the only one still on his feet. Aslan was asleep with his arms around the pillar. Abigail had planted her face on the table in the exact posture she'd been drinking in and passed out cold.
Alone now, Rai gathered a few of the bottles and dishes from the table, went to a corner, and sat down on the floor. Philia, who had been lying across his thigh, kept a death grip on his waist even in her sleep, and so she was dragged along. Rai sat, laid her down, and drank by himself.
Apart from the bedrooms, a villa is not a quiet place.
The attendants' day began at dawn. They moved briskly from room to room, finishing the cleaning and the preparations. There was no loud conversation, but the noise of all that busy motion was enough to tickle Philia's ears, and bit by bit she started to come around.
It wasn't the pillow she usually used at the villa, but the warm one under her head felt wonderful. She shifted a little, feeling out the texture of it — and then, all at once, her mind went crystal clear and her eyes snapped open.
"Finally awake?"
Rai looked down at a Philia who had frozen solid. She stared up at him for a long time, and as yesterday's memories began to surface, her eyes started to shake.
"My leg's gone numb, so get up already— ghk—"
"Kyaah—!"
A cute little scream and a decidedly not-cute fist sent Rai's jaw snapping to the side. Philia shot to her feet, her face burning. The attendants cleaning the banquet hall all turned to look, and her cheeks went even redder. She covered her face and fled. Rai slumped onto the floor.
As if nothing at all had happened, an attendant swept a broom across the floor right in front of him and moved on.
I'm crazy. I'm crazy. I'm crazy. I'm crazy.
Philia was in a worse state than she'd been before she started drinking. She bolted into her own bedroom and hid in the bed.
The soft feel of the pillow told her exactly what she had been nuzzling earlier. She kicked the blankets in a frenzy, then went still.
Face buried in the pillow, flushed to the roots, she tried to calm a heart that would not stop trembling.
Philia Serios.
This was the first time a man had ever made her heart race.
Whether that racing was fondness or sheer mortification, she still had no idea.