An Audience With the Crown Prince, and an Annoyed Marquis
“What?”
What came out of Arendt's mouth was an unexpectedly bold demand.
Cantares blinked.
“Why?”
“Why, as in why me? Or why do you even ask whether it's necessary?”
“Both.”
“The answer to the first one is simple—you need someone to raise hell for you. Unless there's someone else you'd rather order around?”
The Arendt who said this looked oddly pleased with himself.
Cantares, by contrast, was having his insides scraped raw in real time.
The corners of the Crown Prince's smile-fringed lips began to tremble.
“…….”
“And for the second—it's because I need something. I'll explain the reason later. Or if you'd like, you're welcome to come and see it for yourself.”
Zereon, who had been warily watching the exchange between the two as he glanced back and forth between them, cautiously stepped in.
“……The old training grounds you used to use are vacant at the moment, Your Highness.”
“Have it readied. Tell them I'll be using it.”
“Understood, sir.”
Zereon answered quickly, then stole another look at Arendt's face.
It was as expressionless as ever, and yet somehow it radiated satisfaction.
Cantares, meanwhile, had lost all of his earlier swagger and now wore a face full of grievance as he grumbled.
“My orders come first. If the matter wraps up to my satisfaction, I'll grant you access.”
“Yes, understood.”
A brisk, chipper reply came back from Arendt.
Cantares muttered under his breath.
“You sound awfully confident. I take it you have some brilliant plan up your sleeve?”
“Not at all. But…….”
After a brief pause, Arendt tilted his head slightly.
“Once I'm in there, I'm sure something will come to me.”
Arendt's golden eyes glittered as he said it.
Cantares pressed his lips shut and studied him in silence.
The fine-boned face, still tinged with boyhood, was remarkably difficult to read. At a glance it seemed to carry the reckless mischief befitting his age; in another light it looked earnest; and from yet another angle, utterly empty-headed.
Which left Cantares feeling a faint glimmer of hope and a creeping unease at the same time.
He had confirmed, more than once by now, that Arendt possessed a strange talent for getting results in the most unexpected of ways.
Which means he'll bring back exactly the outcome I'm hoping for.
After Arendt left the office, Cantares glowered at the closed door for a long while, thoroughly put out.
“Zereon.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“Is this a smart thing to do?”
Even left to his own devices, the boy caused plenty of chaos. And what Cantares was doing now amounted to little more than laying out a stage for him.
“Can I handle what comes next, you mean?”
“You'll have to, Your Highness. I objected clearly.”
It was a kind answer, delivered with unshakeable firmness.
Cantares let out a long, deep sigh.
The dice had already been thrown. All that remained was to do what needed doing while waiting to see how they landed.
“Arendt.”
“Yes.”
Arendt answered Laios's calm summons without so much as a flicker of interest.
Laios's face was as expressionless as ever. But his eyes could not quite conceal the flood of words churning beneath the surface, held down by sheer force of will.
“You helped an attendant in a difficult situation, I hear.”
“Not particularly, no.”
Hearing Arendt's flat response, Laios strove to keep his composure.
Helping the weak was the very essence of knighthood. But hearing that Arendt had acted like a knight was roughly on par with hearing that a cat had declared its intention to graze on grass.
“I'm told Marquis Grig has taken to his bed.”
“To think his constitution was so frail. We should have recommended a tonic.”
“…….”
Laios began pressing firmly at his temples.
That attempt to quell an oncoming headache had become a familiar sight to Arendt by now.
Several days had passed since his conversation with Cantares. In that time, Arendt had crossed paths with Marquis Grig at the palace again and again.
Each and every time, Arendt made a show of nodding politely and pretending to know him, and each and every time, the marquis took the bait of his featherlight provocations.
After about five rounds of it, a man who had rarely known a single thing in life to go against his will finally collapsed under the weight of his own fury.
The palace was already awash with rumors: Marquis Grig, teased beyond endurance by a mere apprentice knight, had taken to his sickbed.
Massaging his throbbing temples, Laios went on.
“Regardless—be careful. If your enemies multiply within the Imperial Capital, you're the one who suffers for it.”
“I'll manage. It's not as though I have anything left to lose. Frankly, it works in my favor.”
But Arendt remained utterly unbothered.
“Contempt is still attention.”
“What?”
That terse reply carried, without a doubt, the question the ever-composed Laios could not bring himself to say aloud: what nonsense are you spouting now?
Arendt simply continued, his expression unchanged.
“Once you've gathered everyone's eyes on you, there are all sorts of ways to put them to use.”
“Use?”
The oddly disquieting word made Laios's brow crease almost imperceptibly.
But Arendt played the innocent without a hint of shame.
“So long as somebody got a good laugh out of it, that's all that matters. Well—either way, if he's bedridden, he won't be showing his face around the palace for a while. No chance of running into him, so you needn't worry.”
Laios was sincerely grateful that Marquis Grig could not see him at this very moment. If the marquis had witnessed this display, it would surely not have ended at merely taking to his bed.
At the very least, he would have vomited blood and collapsed.
“……Go on, then.”
“Yes.”
The moment Laios spoke like a man who had surrendered everything, Arendt bowed his head briskly, as though he'd been waiting for exactly that, and sauntered straight out of the office.
Thud.
The door closed.
Laios exhaled a short sigh and leaned back into his chair with a soft thump.
The single line Arendt had left behind echoed at the edge of his hearing.
“So long as somebody got a good laugh out of it.”
To call the marquis's popular standing good would have been generous even as a joke. What was more, quite a few of the palace's attendants and servants had suffered at his hands over the years.
Perhaps that was why the palace staff seemed to find the whole affair nothing short of delicious: the great marquis, his pride so wounded by a single apprentice knight that he'd keeled over backward.
At least for now, it was safe to assume that hardly anyone among the palace attendants had a bad word to say about Arendt.
Laios groaned aloud.
“Not a single quiet day.”
He turned his gaze back to the documents scattered across his desk. The one sitting on top concerned the security arrangements for the banquet scheduled a few days hence.
With another short sigh, Laios picked up the papers—entirely unaware of what schemes his superior and his subordinate were weaving around that very banquet.
The weather was fair.
Arendt stretched, then rolled his stiff shoulders in a slow circle.
“No one to pester me. It's actually rather pleasant.”
“And why is your face so damn cheerful……?”
A voice on the verge of death pulled Arendt abruptly from his thoughts. He glanced sideways to find Arthur, his face black as ash.
“Nice weather. Body feels light. What reason would I have not to be?”
“…….”
Arthur glared at him with the intensity of a man contemplating murder.
The two were patrolling the palace interior together. A few minor incidents had cropped up here and there, but on the surface the palace was at peace—which meant patrol duty was barely distinguishable from a walk taken for the sake of appearances.
And yet Arthur wore the face of a man about to die of exhaustion.
It was hardly surprising. Through no design of his own, he had been stuck at Arendt's side with mounting frequency. Over the past several days, Arthur had been wedged between the marquis and Arendt, dripping cold sweat the entire time.
He'd watched their sparring matches unfold at close range at least three or four times. Arthur had thrown himself into breaking things up each time, but these two were hardly the sort to be talked down.
“Who asked you to step in? Just stay out of it and that's the end of it.”
“How am I supposed to stay out of it?!”
Finally at the end of his rope, Arthur barked. Arendt made a show of covering one ear.
“You're loud. What are you so worked up about?”
“Do you have any idea what you'd get up to if we left you alone? I look away for one second and who knows—you might sell off the whole palace!”
“What would I even do? The marquis is recovering at his estate, isn't he? Works out nicely. I have no business with him for a while. You should feel relieved too, Senior Arthur.”
“Is your face made of iron or something?”
Whatever grumbling Arthur kept up at his side, Arendt strolled along at his leisure.
Truthfully, he did think he'd gone a little—just a very little—overboard. But there was nothing to be done about it. Marquis Grig had reacted with such spectacular intensity that Arendt had simply been obliged to mock him in a wider variety of ways than originally planned.
Thanks to which, Arendt had spent the past several days feeling like a stage comedian.
The insolent clown of a knight, and the foolish, greedy noble. There could be no finer interlude for snaring the audience's attention.
A banquet, hm.
Hands thrust deep into his pockets, Arendt turned the matter over in his head.
He had a rough idea of what was coming. But the situation had shifted, and events would not unfold precisely along the lines he remembered.
There was no mention of Marquis Grig.
The order Cantares had given Arendt was the same one Laios received in the novel, but its finer details differed somewhat from what Arendt knew.
In the novel, Cantares had read the uneasy undercurrent running among the nobles. He'd noticed money flowing in strange directions and had tried to trace it, but with the Empire in such turmoil, things had not gone his way.
So Cantares had called a banquet to gather the nobles in one place, ordering Laios to keep watch over their movements.
Laios found the nobles behaving suspiciously. Tail-ing them, he discovered they were siphoning off funds through embezzlement and tax evasion.
Everyone involved was rounded up and arrested.
In the investigation that followed, they sang the same tune in unison: yes, they had evaded taxes, but only because they themselves had been swindled.
And the swindler was……
Did he die, again?
Working from the nobles' testimony, Laios had succeeded in tracking down the con man's trail. But when the knights set out to make the arrest, all that greeted them was one cold corpse.
Standing before a body arranged to look like suicide, there was little more the knight order could do. The investigation was quietly closed.
That con man must be the owner of the Garden the Crown Prince is looking for.
Arendt turned the thought over slowly. Now that the information of the Garden—which had never appeared in the novel—had entered the picture, perhaps this time they could catch the swindler alive and breathing, instead of a corpse.
He might even be tied up with those Broken Heart people.
Because the swindler had died, the fate of the funds he'd swallowed had been lost forever. Which meant the possibility that the money had flowed to the ones preparing for war could never be ruled out.
When his thoughts reached that point, Arendt shot a sideways glance at Arthur. Arthur, meeting his eyes, wrinkled his brow.
“What.”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Arendt turned his head away, feigning perfect innocence.
Beside him, Arthur's muttering drifted past his ear. Arendt, long practiced at this, tuned it out entirely and sank back into his thoughts.
The fact that the situation had changed at all was the result of Arendt thrashing and clawing for his own survival. The traitor who should have been executed was free, needling nobles for sport, and this young knight who should have been mourned as a casualty was alive and well, both eyes wide open.
The story was shifting, step by steady step. Arthur, walking along beside him right now, was living proof of it. More would change still—and Arendt fully intended to press every one of those changes into service toward steering this story to victory.
He swept his gaze in a wide arc around him.
The palace bustled with preparations for the banquet mere days away. It had been a long while since the last grand event, and everyone seemed giddy with it.
Which meant it was time for Arendt to fall in step and do a little more groundwork of his own—in his own way, one that had nothing to do with Laios.
The bigger the board, the better.
There was one more person, after all. Someone whose future Arendt had altered, and who could, in circumstances like these, be bent to his purposes as he pleased.
The corner of Arendt's mouth curled upward.
Arthur, who had been quietly watching him, shuddered.
“That little bastard's plotting something again……”