The Immoderate Apprentice
However much it chafed him, Llewellyn had come to realize that Arendt's choice had not been a mistake.
"Oh... ooooh! Whoaaaaa!"
Watching Llewellyn's eyes sparkle like a child's, Count Stadler managed an awkward smile. Beside him, Arendt—true to form—simply gazed up at the dragon with his usual listless indifference.
"Um, Sir Arendt. What exactly is this...?"
"His Highness Prince Llewellyn expressed a great deal of interest, so I brought him along."
"I... see."
Count Stadler watched the prince darting this way and that with evident anxiety, apparently worried he might trip and fall.
The evening before, having been wrung utterly ragged by Arendt's relentless interrogation, Llewellyn had returned to the imperial palace only to receive a most unexpected gift.
Once the banquet began, there would be little opportunity to examine anything up close, Arendt had said—so why not take advantage of the lull and go see the dragon bones first? He had been the one to offer.
Arms crossed, Arendt studied the prince for a long moment, then asked with a crooked tilt of his head.
"So. Is it fake?"
"No—no! Absolutely, absolutely not!"
Llewellyn came clattering over at a run, seized Arendt by the shoulders, and started shaking him for all he was worth.
"Where did you find it? How did the ghouls move? What position? What were the conditions? You said you were at the site yourself!"
"You're giving me a headache."
Arendt smacked his hands away with a flat tak and recoiled in disgust.
Llewellyn paid him no mind whatsoever.
"This is a genuinely monumental discovery. A dragon in this perfect a condition—look at the neck vertebrae! There are old battle scars there, from a fight long, long ago!"
"You can tell, Your Highness?"
At that, Count Stadler, who had been standing quietly by, suddenly came alight with energy.
Llewellyn nodded vigorously.
"Of course I can tell! The only thing capable of leaving tooth marks in dragon bone is another dragon! Goodness, what on earth happened here?"
"Your eye for detail is remarkable, Your Highness!"
The two men, finding themselves instantly kindred spirits, began chattering away at each other, spraying spit in their mutual enthusiasm over just how beautiful the dragon's bones were.
One of the reasons Arendt had bothered to bring Llewellyn here at all—rather than leaving the Count to his solitude—was precisely this.
They would be working together down the line, so it was better for Llewellyn and Count Stadler to get acquainted early. Besides, Arendt had suspected that two men mad in roughly the same direction would get along splendidly.
"Enough flattery, both of you. Let's pick up where we left off."
With a single sharp clap, Arendt cleared the air. Llewellyn blinked, shook himself, and turned back around.
"Ah, right. The cooperation. That's what we were discussing. Now that I've confirmed the dragon's real, I've no intention of adding conditions. But..."
"But?"
"I may look like this, but I'm still a prince of Everan. I've no intention of inheriting the throne—none whatsoever—but even so, I'd rather not turn my back on my family. So I can't hand you information exclusively."
"I wouldn't dream of asking for that much. What I need is a right of first refusal. After all, I'll be the one providing the leads."
Leads.
At that word, Llewellyn arched an eyebrow.
"Right, and that's what's been nagging at me. What exactly are you, that you can supply me leads? Whatever a foul temper people say you have, you're still nothing more than a single apprentice knight."
Of course, he knew by now that wasn't the whole story. Even so, he had to ask.
Because it might, conceivably, bring harm to his kingdom.
"Your Highness, are you familiar with the Neumann Merchant Guild?"
The question came out of nowhere, and Llewellyn tilted his head.
"Of course. It's the guild that's been exploding onto the scene within the empire. Just recently it even began trading with our kingdom."
"Then are you also aware of the verified information brokerage the Neumann Merchant Guild launched recently?"
"Heard about that too. They say they're opening a branch in our kingdom."
Neumann had been expanding his influence aggressively as of late. Even the indomitable East Merchant Guild had found itself wobbling under the momentum.
"I happen to hold a rather substantial share in that information business."
"Huh?"
"Feel free to confirm it at the banquet. The guildmaster will be attending in person, I expect. To put it simply: any information the Neumann Merchant Guild gets its hands on can reach my ears as well."
At the staggering claim dropped so casually into the conversation, Llewellyn's mouth fell wide open.
"Does that lend some credibility to my offer of leads?"
"...No, hold on. What are you?"
"I'll sift the useful items out of the guild's intelligence network and pass them along to you. You're more than capable of verifying them yourself. And I'm aware you keep puppies of your own, Your Highness."
"..."
This time, at last, Llewellyn's mind went blank.
The 'puppies' Arendt spoke of were the Explorer Coalition that Llewellyn operated in secret.
The prince's mouth opened and shut several times before he finally barked out:
"Y-you—what on earth are you? How did you know? Not a single soul knows I'm the coalition's leader!"
"Wh-where do eternal secrets exist in this world? Honestly, how naive."
"Hah..."
Faced with the man's态度—picking at his ear and brushing the whole thing off—Llewellyn could only heave a sigh.
With his kingdom's support, he traveled far and wide, exploring and lending diplomatic assistance, but there were hard limits to the freedom a prince's status allowed him.
And so Prince Llewellyn had organized a band of adventurers—a personal force he could move on his own authority.
In the deepest secrecy.
Because if the royal family found out, they'd clutch the backs of their necks and howl.
And yet the one person who'd seen through it was neither an imperial insider nor even a foreign noble—just some apprentice knight from another country.
Arendt watched the foreign prince flounder in shock with a look of mild pity, then shrugged.
"No one else knows yet, so you can rest easy."
"What, you found that out through the Neumann Guild too?"
"No. In any case, that's not what matters."
Not that I could tell you I read it in a novel where you were a side character.
"I consider myself a rather excellent connecting link, you see. It won't cost you anything, Your Highness."
"..."
"How you choose to make use of what I dig up is my business alone. But nothing I do will bring harm to your kingdom. And of course, the coalition's existence stays secret."
The fight against the evil god cult would only grow, and when it did, the Everan Kingdom would have to be brought in as an ally sooner or later. All Arendt's maneuvering did was pull that moment slightly closer.
Llewellyn regarded Arendt in a silence unlike any before, his gaze grown quieter, more weighted.
What the man described wasn't a bad arrangement... no, looked at from a certain angle, it was a flawless chain of intelligence.
Information from the Neumann Merchant Guild, verified by Llewellyn's coalition, then dug into one final time by Count Stadler, who stood right here in this hall. The result would surely be intelligence of the finest quality.
The single problem was... that the link binding it all together was this nobody of an apprentice knight.
"It's a good deal, just as you said. I've no reason to refuse. But one thing still bothers me."
"Which is?"
"If everything you've been babbling on about is true—"
There, Llewellyn paused.
"—you're way too big a deal."
Arthur, who was unmistakably his senior, and Count Stadler, a researcher brilliant enough to spearhead the study of dragons—they had both been suspiciously docile.
"Nobody stopped you from growing into this? Shouldn't you have died half a dozen times already?"
When a person of no particular consequence ends up holding excessive power, that power becomes poison—always.
And judging from the temperament Arendt had shown all this time, he seemed far more likely to accumulate enemies than allies.
"You pull stunts like this. Why does everyone just leave you alone?"
"...I doubt everyone leaves me alone so comfortably, Your Highness. It's simply that no one can touch me."
Count Stadler, quiet until now, spoke up softly.
"Besides, making an enemy of Sir Arendt would mean turning your back on His Highness the Crown Prince as well—the sole heir to the empire."
Llewellyn found himself gazing at Arendt with a strange, distant feeling.
Meeting those golden eyes—still as a placid lake, utterly without the slightest tremor—sent an odd chill down his spine.
This one...
He was far more formidable than he'd imagined.
A corner of the frozen mouth curled upward, forming a smile.
And a moment later, Llewellyn burst out laughing.
"BWAHAHAHA! Good—too good! This is a situation that calls for me getting down on my knees and begging. Let me work with you!"
"That does sound entertaining. Do try it. And there's one thing you've overlooked."
Arms still crossed, Arendt added with a crooked smirk:
"It's true that I'm exceptional—but it's equally true that everyone else is hopelessly incompetent."
Saying such a thing without a flicker of hesitation in front of a prince of the realm was insolence and arrogance of the highest order.
And no line could have suited anyone better. In all the lands under heaven, the only man that arrogance fit was Arendt von Eckhart—precisely one of him.
Llewellyn's laughter only grew louder.
He clutched his belly and rolled with mirth for a long while, and Arendt—wearing an expression of pure annoyance—simply let him carry on.
Count Stadler could do nothing but smile awkwardly.
Only after a considerable time did Llewellyn finally calm himself, wiping the tears clinging to the corners of his eyes as he gave Arendt a hearty slap on the back.
"Hey, you're just too good. Wanna be friends?"
"I beg your pardon?"
It was Count Stadler who reacted to those words. Becoming friends with a foreign prince was a matter of enormous consequence, after all.
But Arendt refused flatly.
"Keep your distance, please. I decline."
He was already working the Crown Prince's fingers to the bone; there was nothing novel about it worth repeating.
Few guests barged into Crown Prince Cantares's office without so much as a word of notice.
People brazen enough to intrude on the heir's private hours were vanishingly rare, and even on the odd occasion one appeared, Zereon was there to turn them away.
But there existed exactly one man who possessed neither the awe of the imperial household that any subject of the empire should carry, nor whom even Zereon himself could stop.
At this point, calling him a natural disaster wouldn't be much of an exaggeration, would it.
That godforsaken apprentice-knight brat.
The barging in was one thing—but the words that came tumbling out afterward were a whole other spectacle.
An incident where a prince had slipped out in the dead of night and gotten himself tangled in a confrontation—by now, that was the least of it.
Looking back and forth between Llewellyn, beaming radiantly, and Arendt standing beside him, Cantares felt an emotion for which he had no name whatsoever.
"I look forward to working with you, Your Highness!"
Especially compared to that first formal visit, the prince's expression was so bright it defied comparison—and watching it, Cantares found his mind growing increasingly muddled.
Pressing hard at his temples to quell both his throbbing migraine and the rest of it, the Crown Prince asked:
"Your Highness. Did that brat by any chance coerce you? Blackmail you? Anything of that nature?"
"He did! Haha! He fleeced me so thoroughly I can't even work up a proper anger about it."
At the cheerful reply, Cantares finally buried his face in his hand.
"Sir Arthur was with you, I heard. Did he not try to stop it?"
"He was clutching his stomach with much the same expression you're wearing, Your Highness."
Thanks to the man's shameless answer, Cantares felt a fire rising in his chest. Even the sympathetic look Zereon was casting him from behind had begun to curdle into pure irritation.
It would be far better not to know—yet this bastard had a long history of stirring up trouble and then reporting it to Cantares's face, every single time, punctual as clockwork.
The reason was...
"You want me to clean up after you if things go sideways. That it?"
"Correct answer."
That pleased smirk of his was so infuriating it made Cantares want to throw a punch.
But it was undeniably a reasonable proposal.
Which made it all the more infuriating.
If the man had made some preposterous demand instead, there would at least have been a handle to grab him by.
"First, Your Highness, let me draw the lines clearly. This transaction is strictly between the explorer Llewellyn and the apprentice knight Sir Arendt. Whatever use is made of the investigation results handed to Sir Arendt, I will take no interest in it."
Llewellyn stepped forward nimbly, smoothing the atmosphere once more.
"That said, Your Highness the Crown Prince is the heir of the Callion Empire, and will no doubt pick up a few things along the way. So I too, as a prince of the Everan Kingdom, have one request to make."
"Speak it."
"Remember the Everan Kingdom, Your Highness. I know His Imperial Majesty is still with us. But you and I are the generation that must carry things forward, and we must prepare for that in advance."
As the words poured out fluently, the prince smiled with genuine delight.
"The empire and the kingdom already enjoy good relations. But when the time comes—someday—I would ask you to think of Everan once more."
There was not a trace of self-interest in the way he laid his purpose bare and pressed on. Only a pure, unadulterated passion could be felt in it.
Cantares, who had been studying him with an odd look in his eyes, found himself smiling back in spite of everything.
"...I've heard you opened trade routes with the non-human tribes with your own hands. You are indeed the sort of man to say such things. Very well. So I shall."
Cantares extended his hand, and Llewellyn took it in a firm, unhesitating grip.