Episode 23
Everything I was wearing now had once belonged to the Eighth Princess.
If I took the princess at her word, these were clothes she no longer wore simply because she had grown tired of the color. But they had been bought from a boutique run by artisans whose skill and trustworthiness were officially recognized by the imperial household, the sort of people only royalty bought from.
Which meant the clothes on my back were far better than most garments could hope to be, and the princess’s claim that I had come looking shabby was, quite frankly, a stretch.
It had only been a few months.
Maybe in a former life that would have meant something, but in this world, where even a duke might wear the same outfit for two or three seasons, it was hardly enough time for fashion to go stale.
The princess was doing this purely because she wanted to dress me up.
I didn’t know why.
If you looked only at my face, people said I was pretty, but I never felt anything like that when I looked in the mirror.
If anyone was beautiful, it was the princess, not me.
Besides, I was only ten. I didn’t even have the aesthetic sense to look at a child and think she was pretty or not.
I might know someday, once I’d grown up, but I was going to die before then.
So this was pointless…
“Mm, this color doesn’t suit the young lady.”
“Wouldn’t plain black be fine?”
“Black doesn’t suit me.”
“I don’t think that’s especially true.”
What was so amusing about this that the princess was this enthusiastic?
“It’s an outfit I won’t be wearing for more than three years anyway. Why not just pick something at random?”
“No.”
“That was immediate.”
“I want anything that belongs to me to be beautiful.”
“That’s asking too much of me.”
“Pfft.”
The princess stifled a laugh at my words, and in that smile there was a stubbornness that said she had no intention of listening to me no matter what I said. I fell silent, pressed my lips together, then let out a sigh and held up the twelfth swatch beneath my chin.
“This one will do.”
The color she chose after avoiding black was a pastel peach.
…It was truly a color that did not suit me.
It was the sort of thing I couldn’t criticize further without sounding ridiculous.
As I frowned at it, the princess, looking thoroughly pleased with herself, took the paper dress against my body again and began checking this and that with great care.
“What do you think about exposing the shoulders, young lady?”
“I think it doesn’t matter.”
“Hmm. Then how about a dress like this? The inside of the ballroom is hotter than you’d expect, so we can put a shawl over it outside and just wear the dress inside.”
“Do as you please.”
If anything, I only thought that putting a dress on this body at all was a mistake.
If this was a store recognized by one of the empire’s four ducal houses, then it ought to value something beyond mere money. But with a body like mine, there was no way to realize whatever ideal this place was striving for, so it felt like I was doing nothing more than throwing someone else’s effort straight into the garbage.
The designer probably thought so too.
I sighed at the sight of the designer, whose expression had stiffened from the beginning as she watched me, while the princess cheerfully ordered dress after dress. The princess tilted her head at my sigh, then looked at the designer and nodded as though she understood.
“It’s not contagious or anything. It isn’t a fatal illness either. It’s only a symptom caused by absorbing too much mana, so there’s no need to worry.”
“Ah… O-oh! Haha, I’m sorry, Your Highness. I wasn’t trying to stare…”
“I understand. More importantly, all the accessories here are too large and heavy for a child. Don’t you have anything else?”
“Oh, gloves or handkerchiefs might work. If you tie the knots like this, they can be styled beautifully enough.”
“That’s good. Give me about ten of those handkerchiefs over there, and as for gloves… young lady. Are gloves all right?”
“No, I think gloves would bother me a bit.”
“Is that so? Then give me one pair of short gloves and one pair of long gloves.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
The designer bowed her head and said she would prepare everything for wrapping.
She glanced at my arms and legs once more, then tilted her head and headed into the small room inside, and I stared after her before asking the princess whether she had really been worried about catching whatever illness I had.
“Of course not. I just needed an excuse to look at your arms and legs. Speaking of which, this will be fun at the ball.”
“What will?”
“There will be many more people laughing at you.”
“At the ball? Laughing at the person you brought with you, Your Highness? It’s hard to imagine someone staking their life on a business deal doing that.”
The princess snorted at my words.
When you thought about it rationally, she agreed with me. But since when had people ever been rational beings? she shot back, then began explaining the reasons they would laugh at me.
“The young lady has not appeared outside once in these past ten years.”
“That’s right.”
“Which means that to outsiders, you’ll only look like a child who isn’t protected by the Blum family. Whether you’re a bastard or not won’t matter; they’ll only see that much.”
“Rather than my arms?”
“There are women obsessed with arranged marriages who would call a young nobleman handsome as long as he had money, even if his height were lower than his weight. Why would they care about the young lady’s arms and legs? As long as those arms and legs can keep their feelings quietly subdued, aren’t they harmless? They’ll probably think of them as nothing more than tattoos.”
“A tattoo with veins and flesh showing beneath it. Lovely.”
“Pfft. Have those young ladies ever seen such a thing before?”
“They’ll at least know something is different.”
“That much is true. But they won’t care. What matters to them is what kind of treatment they can expect after marrying in. If the other party—the young master—is completely taken with you, you might not remain a concubine but become the lawful wife instead. If things go exceptionally well, your family might even rise from lower nobility to higher nobility. That’s the only kind of thing they’ll be thinking.”
“So I’ll be watching how the young masters treat me.”
“Exactly. And then, once they realize you can be looked down on, they’ll go on mocking the young lady where you can’t hear them. The rumor that spreads here will probably be that you came without a single accessory and ordered a dress of some unknown design.”
“Doesn’t it matter that I came with Your Highness?”
“I’m probably someone far above them, someone they’d never expect to meet. And in truth, the chance of actually meeting me often enough to memorize my face or personality is slim.”
“…So the rumors can’t be stopped.”
“A boutique is a place for socializing, after all.”
The princess pointed somewhere with her finger.
Following her gaze, I saw noblewomen sipping coffee with elegant composure while examining expensive accessories, and I asked why they were drinking coffee here instead of in a café or coffeehouse.
“They’re likely the wives who came to order clothes.”
“So, their daughters’ clothes.”
“Yes. They’re probably checking the progress and trying to pry information out of the young masters or the internal affairs of the Blum ducal house.”
“Then information about the princess cherishing me will spread too.”
“But information about the maids and butlers talking trash about the young lady will spread much more. If I’m at the ball, it’ll be almost impossible for me to stay by your side the whole time.”
“I see.”
“Well, our goal is to make the young lady seem like a person of Blum. Simply attending the ball already means we’ve achieved the first objective. The rest is just secondary, so don’t get too attached to it.”
“I don’t even know what the rest is supposed to be.”
Was one of the secondary goals to make other people think well of me or something like that?
That didn’t seem possible, so the princess probably hadn’t even considered it as a goal.
More importantly, did we even have any secondary goals at all?
Thinking about it, I couldn’t remember her ever saying such a thing.
Could she have meant what she’d just said in passing—that she wanted anything belonging to her to be beautiful? Was it something related to that?
“Since we’re already attending the ball, let’s make you the main attraction.”
“Do we really have to?”
“The young lady doesn’t like seeing the young masters as the stars of the show either, does she?”
“As long as those people are popular enough to roll around in bed together as a group, I don’t particularly mind.”
“Pfft! Enough with the remarks no ten-year-old should be making. I want to do it. And aren’t you curious too?”
“?”
“What reaction they’d have if the young lady said which of the two is better.”
“……Ah.”
The princess’s suggestion probably didn’t carry any meaning beyond the sentence itself.
She was really only asking which of the two I found more attractive.
But what would the young masters’ reaction be if they heard that?
What about the head of the family, the duchess, the servants?
Could they really take my answer literally, as though I were simply saying which of the two pieces of trash was marginally better?
…That would be difficult.
“Your personality is truly awful.”
“As if yours isn’t! I’m at least twisting myself into knots and using my illness as an excuse to do all this, while for you, isn’t it just a hobby now?”
“Who’s the one shaking me around like this, exactly?”
She chuckled, and then, after laughing outright, she said that once we got home, instead of going out for a walk, we should learn to dance together in a room that could be aired out properly. I only shrugged at that, telling her that the moment I said which of the two I preferred, the dancing and everything else would be gone anyway, so what was the point of practicing at all?