The Prosperous Western Territory - 5
An awkward silence hung in the air. I was too flustered at meeting an acquaintance of my mother’s for the first time in my life to speak, and she was too embarrassed at having mistaken someone’s identity to open her mouth either. It wasn’t only our mouths that had frozen—the cotton candy in her hand kept growing larger and larger—but neither of us thought to mention so trivial a problem.
"…My mother went by the name Ariadne."
I was the one who broke the silence. Addressing anyone who was neither a member of the imperial family nor a duke with formal speech felt strange, but the way she spoke Mother’s name so familiarly told me they must have been close. I could hardly dare speak casually to someone like that.
At my answer, the acquaintance—the blonde elf—brightened at once.
"Then you’re Ariadne’s daughter?"
"Yes, that’s right."
"Oh my, oh my! No wonder you look the spitting image of Ariadne!"
She came right up to me and took my face in both hands, turning it this way and that. I nearly stepped back on instinct, but I held still, knowing she was searching my features for traces of Mother.
Mother’s face now lived only in my memory. If she could still see that face in me, nothing could make me happier.
"It’s true! You look just the way you did as a child!"
An indescribable relief washed over me at those words. Yes—Mother’s blood ran in me after a—
"Thank goodness you didn’t inherit her personality, though. So composed for someone so young."
—ll…?
"…Pardon?"
An odd choice of words made me ask without thinking. Young? Composed?
"Ariadne left home about a hundred and fifty years ago, so you’d be a little over a hundred at most… or am I wrong?"
At my reaction, she blinked and asked the question right back, as if wondering whether she had somehow gotten it wrong.
She had gotten it exactly right, which was precisely why I was so confused. By her reckoning I was over a hundred—and she still called me young?
"This year I turn one hundred and twenty… one."
"You really are a baby!"
The instant the answer left my lips, she started vigorously pawing at my face again.
The look in her eyes was exactly the same one the children had worn when they looked at the Young Duke.
Starting with Ryutis’s candy, then Later’s ice cream, Tanian’s chocolate, Ainter’s chocolate cookies, and more—every kind of snack was solemnly offered up to the Young Duke.
With every new tribute added to the pile, the Young Duke beamed, and the whole party’s expressions melted at that pure, bright smile. Please, please just grow up exactly like this. If you go through some dark phase in your teenage years, it won’t just be House Salon—the entire Empire will fall into despair…
What’s going on?
Only then did I notice the anomaly. Dozens of elves were clustered in a single spot. Even the elves from the shops we had been browsing earlier were walking straight past us toward that dense gathering.
Seriously, what is this? A fight? No—the atmosphere didn’t feel hostile enough for a fight.
Of all times for her to be gone.
An unusual concentration of elves. The Demon Duke, who had been quietly looking forward to meeting her own kind, would have been delighted to hear the news—except she wasn’t here.
While everyone’s attention had been fixed on the Young Duke, the Demon Duke had gone off on her own, saying she wanted to check whether any magical materials sold only in the Elf Sanctuary were available. She had looked so full of anticipation at the chance to meet her people under the pretext of an inspection that I had let her go without a fuss. If I had known the elves would gather the moment she vanished, I would have held her back.
Still, what could I do? Wishing wouldn’t bring a missing person back. Someone else would have to check in her place.
"Luise. I’m going to take a quick look around."
I pointed toward the crowded area and spoke to Luise beside me.
"Ah, yes. Go ahead."
She had looked puzzled at my sudden decision to go alone, but the sight of so many elves packed together made her understand at once. Anyone would be curious about a scene like that.
If anything, Luise looked as though her interest was at maximum and she wanted to come too—but in the end I went alone. Even if it wasn’t a fight, if they had gathered for some negative reason, a whole group of spectators would only make things awkward. Better to assess the situation by myself first.
And I was sincerely glad I had gone alone.
"Good heavens, is she really her daughter? You’re not playing some magic prank? How can she look so much like her?"
"Look at that hair. When Ariadne used to walk around like that it was just funny, but on a little one it’s adorable."
"Everyone stop touching her! What if you scare the child!"
A throng of elves fussed around a single elf in the middle, making such a racket that I almost laughed—they looked just like the club members surrounding the Young Duke. But the elf being swarmed looked extremely familiar.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
It was the Demon Duke. Her ears were pinned flat against her head in a way I had never seen, and her body was rigid while only her eyes darted about—but there was no mistaking her.
"Ah—baby!"
Ah.
The Demon Duke, who had been enduring the countless hands of the elves in a daze, spotted me and called out in desperation. Naturally, every pair of eyes surrounding her snapped straight to me.
"Baby? Child, is that boy your son!?"
"Oh my goodness! A little one barely past a hundred already has a son?"
"Ariadne is… already a grandmother…? By the time she becomes a grandmother, what on earth will I be…"
A minor misunderstanding born of a form of address—no, a catastrophic one—had just been born.
"Little baby! You come over here too!"
And not long after, I found myself buried under a countless storm of hands.
What even is this.
Dozens of questioners, and I had to answer every one of them alone, without a single ally. I had never experienced a parliamentary hearing, but I imagined the atmosphere must be something like this. Fortunately, at least no forgotten past of my own was being dredged up.
"Ah, so he’s your lover?"
"You called him baby and made us misunderstand for nothing."
On top of that, the misunderstanding cleared quickly, and the mood lightened at once.
"A little one and an even littler one as lovers…"
"Oh my, how precious…"
But wouldn’t a hearing have been preferable to being treated like a child like this? Being dismissed for my age was something I was used to—this kind of treatment was a first.
I was going to lose my mind. The Demon Duke, well over a hundred, and I, clinging to the outer edge of marriageable age, being cooed over as children together. The psychological damage was considerable. Young Duke, is this what you’ve been feeling…? I will never treat you like a child again. I’m sorry.
"But where is Ariadne? No matter how well-behaved the children are, you can’t just let them wander around by themselves."
At that, a blonde elf crossed her arms and spoke, and I saw the Demon Duke flinch hard.
"Mother has passed away."
"Hmm? She left you two behind? Honestly, that girl—if she’d come this far, she could at least have shown her face."
The elf’s tone was thick with disappointment, and a cold sweat prickled down my back. That is not what "went home" means.
"She has returned to Enen’s side."
After a brief hesitation, the Demon Duke answered—and a bone-chilling silence settled over them all.
"Ah—th-that is…"
Fortunately, Talula possessed a power that transcended species. I had half-worried that long-lived races might be so detached from death that they thought about it differently from humans, but that did not appear to be the case.
"Ariadne… has left us?"
From that blonde elf’s perspective, the Demon Duke’s mother was a friend. No one would be fine after suddenly hearing that a friend they had lost contact with was dead.
The shock seemed to hit the other elves just as hard; every face was openly stricken. If I had to put it in human terms—like hearing that a classmate you lost touch with after high school graduation had died in their thirties or forties? I couldn’t even begin to grasp the scale.
"Um… little one… when, exactly…?"
A red-haired elf spoke with extreme care. Asking someone who, by elf standards, was still a tiny child, "When did your mother die?" was bound to give them pause—but they still needed to know when their friend had gone. At the very least, to properly mourn a dear companion who had left without their knowing, they needed to know how she had left the world.
"In the summer of the year 1277—"
The Demon Duke’s words never finished. The red-haired elf who had been listening pulled her into a fierce embrace.
Tears streaming, she held the Demon Duke tight and patted her back with one hand—the perfect image of someone soothing a crying child. The one actually crying was the elf, though.
"A hundred and one years ago? Didn’t that child just say she’s a hundred and twenty-one now?"
"Twenty years old is the age when you should be showered with love… how heartbreaking…"
"And Ariadne—what must she have felt, closing her eyes and leaving behind a child still no bigger than a newborn."
The conversation was pure pity and pure grief. Listening to it, I felt my mind go completely blank.
I had guessed that the difference in lifespan between humans and elves would create a serious gap in perception, but this severe? They treated a twenty-year-old as a little one still clinging to a parent’s side?
Insane.
I was reeling. And it wasn’t even as if elves grew more slowly than humans. Even a pure-blooded elf was physically grown by twenty, weren’t they? And they still treated them like children?
Of course, I had never lived in elven society, so I was in no position to judge.
"How hard it must have been for you. Losing your mother at the age when you most needed to be loved, and then living alone for a hundred years…"
At any rate, the Demon Duke also seemed thrown by the tearful comfort. When would she ever have received consolation like this? The father who should have loved and cherished her had gone before her mother, and her mother had followed him as if chasing after him, collapsing to illness.
Friends? Friends could not take the place of an adult. Retainers? Unless they were extraordinarily close, they would never dare pity or console a duke. And even if they had been able to, those friends and retainers would have died before the Demon Duke anyway.
In the end, receiving the comfort of adults for the first time in her life, the Demon Duke quietly hugged the elf back.
Dozens of elves gathered in one place was already enough to draw every eye in a commercial district popular with tourists. For all of them to stand there looking mournful and weeping? It was a sight no one could ignore even if they tried.
"M-Master…?"
On top of that, Luise already knew I had gone over to the elves. With the elves starting to sniffle in that situation, how rattled must she have been?
Dragging the rest of the party over with her, Luise arrived just in time to witness the Demon Duke being patted, stroked, and cooed over by dozens of elves.
"Ah, Luise."
And there was the Demon Duke, greeting her with a mortified face. Her dignity as a master was on the verge of collapse—but fortunately the Demon Duke’s dignity was lofty enough to endure.
"Oh my. Are these our baby’s friends?"
…Or not? Was it not going to hold after all?
"It must have been hard adapting to the human world, and yet you’ve made friends like this. What a clever little one."
"Really? I think it’s sad how early the child had to grow up."
Under the elves’ successive finishing blows, I quietly closed my eyes.
In human society she was the eldest among us and the pinnacle of magic, a figure of reverence—and here she was being treated as a pitiful little child.
…Thank goodness this is a sanctuary.
If elves had been scattered across the continent instead of confined to a protected zone, I shuddered to think what might have happened.