The Knight Who Became a Storyteller
It was Arendt who had suggested they eat in the bustling dining hall.
His reasoning was simple.
"I want to get a feel for the atmosphere."
"The atmosphere?"
"It never hurts to check how the world's turning, you know."
With a formal wanted decree having just been issued against the Sword of the Broken Heart, they all readily agreed that gauging the mood of the populace was a necessity they couldn't afford to ignore.
Not that they'd ever had a say in the matter to begin with — the moment the suggestion came out of Arendt's mouth, their veto had already evaporated.
Before long, having changed into the plain traveling clothes he'd packed on the off chance he'd need them, Arendt slipped into the crowd.
The innkeeper eyed the group with mild puzzlement, but one casual wave from Arthur was enough for the man to catch the gist and hold his tongue.
"By the way, how long are you going to keep this up?"
"Keep what up?"
"What do you mean, 'keep what up'? Young Lord Arcus, obviously."
It was Arthur who threw the first log onto the fire.
Arendt speared a piece of meat with his fork, popped it into his mouth, and chewed.
"I haven't done anything."
"You've been deliberately raking him over the coals."
By now, everyone had noticed the way Arcus kept glancing in their direction from the foot of the stairs.
The gaze of an older brother watching his younger sibling from afar was, for some reason, almost pitifully forlorn.
That Arendt had simply left it alone, without pouncing, was surprising enough in itself.
With a personality like his, if he'd truly meant to cast Arcus aside, it wouldn't have ended so gently.
Richt and Laios apparently shared the same thought, because their eyes drifted toward Arendt as well.
Arcus, no doubt, believed he was being turned away again and again — but to the knights, things looked a little different.
"Is there something you're trying to find out?"
"His motive."
Arendt swallowed his meat and answered with a sullen little frown.
Richt tilted his head in confusion.
"Motive?"
"Why he's carrying on like this, groveling the way he does."
"It's possible there's no ulterior motive at all."
"Maybe. But if that's true, it's somehow even more infuriating. All this time, when he could have been reaching out like this, he kept his mouth shut instead."
...It was a perfectly reasonable point.
One could argue the two of them shared a certain taciturn stiffness, a scarcity of expressions — but beyond that, there wasn't a single other thing the brothers had in common.
Least of all their looks.
Whereas Arcus was the spitting image of Count Eckhart, there was not a trace of the Count to be found in Arendt's handsome, refined features.
Arthur gave a shrug — or rather, an exaggerated imitation of Arendt's customary shrug.
"Fine, do whatever you want. Just remember to bring the young lord a stomach remedy later."
"You carry those around?"
"Packed some before we left. Figured the Commander or the young lord might need them."
Truly, a vision of foresight.
Laios nudged the freshly served dishes toward the knights without a word.
"That aside, it's peaceful here, isn't it?"
National alert levels had surely been raised across the entire empire, and yet not a whiff of tension could be found anywhere in this place.
He supposed people struggling simply to get through each day couldn't afford to react to every piece of news that crossed their path — still, the fact that the evil god wasn't even a topic of conversation came as a mild surprise.
"Was it the same at the temple? You just came back from there, after all."
"Not much different. We asked whether anyone had heard suspicious rumors or run into strange characters, but we didn't get any answers worth noting."
At Richt's response, Arendt cocked his head to one side.
"Then doesn't the wanted decree lose its whole point?"
"Nothing to be done about it. In a major city — if the lords there had put real weight behind publishing the decree — the atmosphere would be different. Here, though..."
This was nothing more than a small town making its living off travelers. Expecting news to travel all the way out here was a tall order.
"Honestly, it won't be much different anywhere else. Unless war actually breaks out."
"Arthur."
"These are people too busy keeping food on the table to worry about things they can't even touch, so naturally—"
"Arthur."
Only when Richt called his name a second time did Arthur finally stop talking.
A beat too late, he noticed the inscrutable little smile on that damned apprentice knight's face.
"...You. Hey. What are you planning?"
"I have no idea what you're imagining, but calm down."
"Why are you treating me like a rabid dog?"
Even with Richt joining the chorus of disapproval, Arendt merely shrugged.
Watching uneasily, Laios eventually set down his fork.
"Hold on, Arendt. First, let's talk about what we—"
But before he could finish.
Snatch.
Arendt had caught the collar of the innkeeper passing by their table.
"Oh dear, anything else you'll be needing?"
"More drinks over here. Oh, and innkeeper — heard anything interesting lately?"
And so the dammed-up floodgates finally burst open.
"Sorry? Interesting... stories? Can't say I have. What sort of strange happenings would come to a little town like this?"
"Oh, nothing special."
It was exactly this kind of light, offhand remark that seized people's attention.
The moment the innkeeper turned back with visible interest, Arthur and Richt — sensing disaster — frantically waved their hands to stop him.
"Hey — hey! What do you think you're doing?"
"Wait. Wait, stop right there, Arendt!"
But Arendt leaned his upper body neatly out of their grasp, flashed a bright smile, and proceeded to unpack his bundle of stories in full.
"Con men selling the name of the gods have been running rampant these days, so I wondered if they'd made their way out here."
"Con men, you say?"
The innkeeper's eyes went round as saucers as he leaned in.
He was, quite simply, a natural for the comic-relief role in any stage play.
"That's right, con men. And get this — the bastards have the gall to call themselves the enemies of Lord Luce. Declared open defiance against the Imperial House. Insolence beyond belief. Who knows? Maybe one or two of them are hiding even in a place like this."
"Here? In our town? Good heavens — who would dare anything so terrifying?"
Arendt flashed the startled innkeeper another winning smile, then sprang to his feet and plopped the man down into the very chair he had just vacated.
Thanks to the innkeeper's loud squawking, the patrons, who had each been absorbed in their own chatter, began to turn their heads toward the commotion, one by one.
"Not that they're here, mind you — I mean they've spread across the whole empire."
His eyes stayed fixed on the innkeeper, but his voice was pitched for everyone to hear — loud enough to carry, soft enough that no one felt rebuffed by it.
"I swing a sword at the Imperial Palace, you see. Not long ago, I crossed blades with those very bastards."
With that, he casually let his gaze drop to the sword at his hip, just enough for the crowd to see it.
Palace sword-swinger. Not an entirely inaccurate description, perhaps — but that oddly casual phrasing made the knights' expressions grow distinctly sour.
"The bastards you mentioned — you mean those con men from before?"
"That's the ones. You wouldn't believe the grief they put me through."
A traveler flushed with drink had begun to show interest as well.
"A palace swordsman, eh? Serving some high-and-mighty lord somewhere, are you?"
"Now that you mention it, your whole company looks fairly well-off, I must say."
A group of grizzled old mercenaries let out a round of hearty laughter.
Having seized the scattered mood of the room in a single stroke, Arendt perched himself atop a table.
"So you really haven't heard anything? Even with all that commotion going on?"
"What commotion would that be? Has something terrible happened in the capital?"
As interest began to gather around him, Arendt took a long, refreshing swig from the drink a server had just set down, then cleared his throat with calculated casualness.
"Well... it's not exactly the sort of thing you go around telling people, but... you poor country folk seem to be entirely in the dark, so I suppose I can explain. Just this once."
Not a soul alive could have stopped Arendt at that moment.
"That damned brat..."
"Well, I mean... it's classified, but..."
"Arthur, give me that stomach medicine you packed."
The knights simply gave up on everything and chose the path of prayer to the heavens instead.
Naturally, the crowd's reaction was blazing hot.
To the entertainment-starved regulars trapped in a small provincial town, a juicy piece of gossip was rain on parched ground; to the information-hungry travelers, it was a rare chance to pick up fresh intelligence.
Quenching the thirst of both camps at once, Arendt unfolded his tales of personal valor, seasoned generously with falsehood and a healthy dose of exaggeration.
"...And so I cut the bastard down with a single stroke."
The innkeeper, who had been the most enthusiastic listener from the very start, kept pushing fresh drinks across the table and begging for the next chapter.
And when the story reached the point where the two great villains — Vincent and Blake — made their entrance, the thoroughly intoxicated crowd began to boil over.
"The gall of them — defiling the name of Lord Luce and the Imperial House!"
"Men like that deserve to be torn apart at the very least."
At some point Arendt had begun drifting from table to table holding court, and now he gave a shrug.
"That's the ones. One of them died on my blade, the other bolted with his tail between his legs — so you could say they've paid their price."
"So you're hunting the one who escaped even now?"
"Exactly. It's the whole reason I came out this way. Being a manhunt for hire — utterly exhausting."
In Arendt's retelling, the cult that worshipped Cernion had taken firm shape in their minds: a band of swindlers who deceived the gullible, and traitors who would stop at nothing — any means, any treachery — to funnel money toward the overthrow of the state.
"So all of you, be careful too. You never know when you might find yourself standing shoulder to shoulder with traitors. If anyone ever coaxes you, saying there's a better god than Lord Luce — come, follow me — don't you take the bait."
"Ha! I'm a man who's given his whole body to Lord Luce. That'd never happen to me."
The old mercenary waved a hand with a bellowing laugh. At his throat, a pendant bearing a halo-shaped emblem — the symbol of God Luce — swayed and glittered.
"Why, you're nothing short of an angel of the god himself, my friends!"
"Hah! It's far too early for anyone to style himself a messenger of Lord Luce. Ask me again after I've torn those vermin out by the roots."
By now, the words flying toward Arendt had shifted into tones of the most reverent deference.
The crowd showering him with admiration and awe, Arendt shamelessly lapping it all up, and behind them the knights who could not so much as lift their heads — the tableau formed a study in contrasts.
His throat growing drier and drier by the second, Arthur drained what remained of his drink.
"That magnificent bastard..."
He'd seen it several times before, and yet each viewing left him marveling at the sheer artistry of it.
His stomach, already burning, now felt a headache climbing up behind it, and Laios pressed his temples hard with both hands.
"...But it's undeniably effective, what he's doing."
"Sir? You believe so?"
"Travelers, mercenaries, and locals, all gathered in one place. The rumor will spread quickly."
Some among them surely wouldn't swallow Arendt's grand epic wholesale.
But it didn't matter.
Even if it was consumed as a moment's entertainment and forgotten, the day they came face to face with the real Evil God Cult, these people would remember Arendt's stories.
The con men who dared stand against the Crown.
An impression, once rooted, was slow to shake loose. Which meant, at the very least, the odds of these people falling for the Cult of Cernion's lures would shrink by a measure.
Loosening information recklessly was a dangerous game — but what Arendt had been spouting was nothing more than a 'tale' in the shape of a rumor, so even that edge would land him in no trouble.
Without doubt, Arendt would have run every one of those calculations to their end before he ever put the plan in motion.
The only remaining problem was the dignity of the knightly order...
Watching him cling to his drink and chatter on like a fish in water, Laios felt his heart twist with complicated feelings.
He looked less like a knight than a wandering minstrel from an old tale — or a court jester.
Just give up on it.
Resigning himself, as Arthur had, to silently knocking back his drinks, Laios suddenly glanced over to where Arcus stood.
Arcus was still there, watching Arendt.
His expressionless face was filled to the brim with turmoil.