What Happened at the Marquess's Estate (2)
The second-floor reception room was a space that laid the Marquis's tastes bare.
Hunting trophies mounted along the walls, a heavy leather sofa, a wine collection arranged in neat rows above the fireplace. It was the room of a man who held both money and force in his hands.
The Marquis sank into the sofa and gestured to the seat across from him.
"Sit."
Claudia stood at his right side.
My eyes met hers.
Black hair pinned up in a neat coil, cold, sharp eyes fixed squarely on me.
That's a look that wants to dissect me down to the molecular level.
"My daughter. Claudia."
The Marquis introduced her with characteristic brevity.
"Killian von Eberhardt."
"Claudia Lawrence."
Claudia's reply was short. In place of a social smile, her sharp gaze lingered for a moment on the sword at my hip before returning to my face.
The Marquis pulled out a bottle of wine from beside the fireplace—the same wine he'd served at dinner my first night here. The kind the Grand Duke had supposedly favored.
Volph's name never came up.
As he poured the wine, the Marquis spoke in a leisurely tone.
"That aura of yours. When did you awaken it?"
Ever since he'd seen the Grand Duke's aura in the courtyard, this man's eyes had changed.
"Not long ago."
"Not long ago, and you finished off a vice commander in three exchanges?"
The Marquis laughed and handed me the glass.
"Your father awakened at twenty. Bringing up an aura like that at eighteen makes you faster than Duke Theodore himself."
That was information I hadn't expected. The original novel never specified when the Grand Duke had awakened either.
"I'll be honest with you."
The Marquis leaned forward.
"I could hand over a worm like Volph tomorrow if I felt like it. There's no reason to drag this into an imperial legal dispute over a single runaway treasurer."
Then why did you keep him for three days?
"I asked for three days because I wanted to make you a proposal. Just one."
The Marquis's gaze brushed past Claudia. It was only an instant, but I saw her shoulders stiffen.
"And that proposal would be?"
"What do you suppose would happen if Eberhardt and Lawrence joined hands?"
The air in the room shifted. This man had been arranging an entirely different board from the start.
"If the Grand Duchy and the Marquisate tear at each other's throats in the north, we both grow weak. But if we join hands? We become a power that neither the Emperor nor the Holy See can touch lightly."
The Marquis's logic was clear-cut—and dangerous.
"Marquis. You're speaking of an alliance—the man who was putting holes in my family's treasury until yesterday?"
The Marquis looked sheepish.
"That was before you caught your rat. The man sitting in front of me now is someone else entirely."
He read it exactly right. It's true—I'm a completely different person.
"Think it over. You'll have Volph regardless. What I want to hear is your answer to what comes after."
Just as I was about to rise from my seat, the Marquis added one last thing.
"You'll dine with us tonight. Claudia will join as well. My daughter takes after her mother—quite the beauty, isn't she."
Claudia's brows arched in a sharp curve. Apparently, this hadn't been agreed upon between father and daughter beforehand.
After that brief conversation, I returned to my guest room and sprawled across the bed. Hans stood guard at the door, while two Lawrence knights were posted at either end of the corridor. Whether that counted as surveillance or protection was anyone's guess.
I stared at the ceiling and sorted through my thoughts.
An alliance.
The Marquis's proposal kept circling in my head.
In the original novel, Marquis Chester was the man who swallowed the Grand Duchy whole. And now that man was proposing an alliance—even offering to introduce his daughter. The moment he saw my aura, his entire attitude had flipped.
It was a simple calculation: better to pull Eberhardt's strength onto his own side than to keep it as an enemy. A very Marquis-like judgment.
The problem was that none of this existed in the original story. There, the Marquis had remained the Grand Duchy's enemy to the very end. Me coming here in person, showing him my aura—those were the things bending the current off its course.
Whether that was a good thing, I still couldn't tell.
I had to be careful here. Alliance or not, I couldn't afford to hand over any information.
"...Let me get a little sleep."
I closed my eyes. I had a nightmare.
In it, Stella came chasing after me with a pillow in her arms, all the way to the Marquisate's gates.
Dinner was served in a small dining room of the Marquisate.
A round table beneath candlelight, set with three places. The arrangement made us outsiders crashing a family meal.
The Marquis at the head, Claudia on his right, and me across from them.
The Marquis carved his meat and brought up light conversation.
"How did you come to learn territory management? Self-taught?"
"I read."
"You caught a phantom trading house by reading?"
The Marquis smiled, clearly amused.
"The ledgers had all the numbers written in them. You only need to know how to read them."
For the first time, Claudia spoke.
"If you examined the ledgers yourself, does that mean you suspected the steward from the very beginning?"
A low, clear voice. It took the shape of a question, but her intent lay somewhere else entirely. A recluse of a young lord had suddenly gone digging through the books—she wanted to know what had caused the change.
"Suspicion isn't quite the word. I'd say it's because trusting something you haven't verified is simply laziness."
At the word trust, something hardened in Claudia's eyes.
"I heard you kept to your room. When exactly did you start thinking this way?"
This woman suits an interrogator's chair better than a noble lady's.
"Since my father passed."
I let the silence sit for a moment. Pressing down my emotions—answering the way a man who'd lost his father would. That was enough.
"Sitting alone in that room, thinking was all there was to do."
It was true that I'd spent my first days in this body sorting out my situation from that room. The best lies mix a single spoonful of falsehood into a base of truth.
Over his wine, the Marquis watched the silent contest between me and his daughter with evident delight. He wore the expression of a man thoroughly enjoying his daughter's probing expedition. So he's switched to spectator mode.
As the meal went on, Claudia fired off several more questions. The knights' current combat strength. The territory's annual revenue. My younger brother's level of swordsmanship.
Every single one was aimed straight at the Grand Duchy's internal affairs.
I answered half and let the other half slide. The knights were in the process of restructuring. Revenue was in the middle of normalization. Felix's swordsmanship was under instruction.
Not a single concrete number left my lips.
"You're quite the cautious one, my lord."
"I've always been a man of few words."
I took a sip of wine and took her measure. Claudia Lawrence—cold and sharp-tongued, exactly as the original novel had described. Only far more aggressive than I'd imagined.
So I decided to return the favor.
"Might I ask one thing of my own, Lady Claudia?"
Claudia nodded without expression.
"The eldest daughter of House Lawrence joining a dinner with an outside guest—is that your father's instruction, or your own will?"
For the first time, words failed her.
The question was a trap either way. If she said it was her father's instruction, she'd sound like a puppet with no will of her own. If she said it was her own wish, she'd be admitting interest in the Grand Duchy's heir.
"It is my father's wish."
She chose the safe answer.
The Marquis cut in.
"Mine, of course. I wanted to show you my daughter."
He wanted to show her to me. That phrasing carried more weight than it let on. I still couldn't tell what he intended by it, though.
"An honor."
As the meal ended and we rose from our seats, the Marquis added one more thing.
"You'll join us again tomorrow. We keep dinners simple here, so come without ceremony."
The Marquis's hospitality was growing thicker by the hour. The kind of change that felt uneasy to accept without thinking it through.
I was walking down the corridor toward my room when footsteps followed behind me.
"My lord."
Claudia. In the dim corridor, her violet eyes caught the lamplight and reflected it coldly.
"Just one question."
She pressed on without waiting for an answer.
"Why did you come here in person?"
Her composure had been set aside. There was a raw curiosity soaking through her tone.
She could have demanded a visit by formal letter, or sent an envoy. A heir responsible for keeping a family on the verge of collapse from waltzing straight into enemy territory defied every reasonable calculation.
So she spent the whole dinner circling the question, and now that we're alone, she pulls out the real one.
"There was a reason I had to come myself."
"What reason?"
I took a step back and inclined my head lightly.
"You'll learn that once my business with the Marquis is concluded."
Claudia's lips trembled faintly. The traces of a swallowed retort were unmistakable.
"Good night, Lady Claudia."
I turned my back and walked. Kept my footsteps even. I could feel her gaze fixed on my back, but I didn't look around. Turn around now, and I lose.
Only after closing the door to my room did I let out a long breath.
Unbelievable. There's a blade hidden in every single question that comes out of that woman.
I sat down on the edge of the bed.
Until the Marquis gave me his answer, I had to hold out in this castle.
"...Is living comfortably something I can only manage in my next life?"
Just as I was about to sigh, a knock sounded at the door.
It wasn't Hans's voice.
"My lord. My father asks that you join him for tea in the garden tomorrow morning."
Claudia. Not even a minute since we'd parted in the corridor, and here she was already delivering my next appointment. Was delivering a servant's errand beneath her notice—or was the tea merely an excuse?
"Understood."
The footsteps receded.
The father probes you at dinner, the daughter questions you at night, and come morning it's observation in the garden. Did this father and daughter work in shifts?
The Marquis's calculations, Claudia's probing, and Volph, who had yet to show his face.
Within these walls, I was both guest and prey.
There was no way a cup of tea in tomorrow morning's garden would be a simple one.
At that same hour, in Claudia's room.
Claudia Lawrence sat before her mirror, letting down her hair as she sorted through her thoughts.
"Killian von Eberhardt."
When she'd first read the reports, she had laughed. He cut off a special envoy's arm? He dug through ledgers and caught an embezzler? The young lord who never left his room?
And then that same young lord had stormed into her father's castle with three knights, and today he'd put a vice commander flat on the ground in three exchanges.
Not a single line of those reports had turned out to be true.
Her comb came to a stop amid her hair.
Her plan had been simple. Infiltrate the Grand Duchy, identify their weaknesses, and siphon out internal information. A few days, she'd thought, would be more than enough.
Instead, the eldest son had marched in openly, first—negotiating directly with her father.
It had irritated her. The plan lay in pieces, and the initiative had belonged to the other side from the very beginning.
The scene from the courtyard flashed through her mind. Blue aura rising from a blade. That light her father had never managed to reach in his entire life, flickering in the hands of an eighteen-year-old boy.
The moment his sword stopped at three exchanges, Claudia had understood. This man could have ended it in two. He'd deliberately spent one extra exchange.
Someone who knew how to withhold information.
Dinner had been the same. Every answer had sounded like the truth, and yet there hadn't been a single number in any of them. All of it, deliberately vague.
She looked at her own face in the mirror.
"This is... going to be harder than I thought."
He hadn't answered her final question in the corridor. Asked why he'd come in person, he'd only said she would know soon enough.
One thing was certain: he was no longer the reclusive young lord of the reports.
By now, by all rights, she should have been preparing to depart for the Grand Duchy. Disguised as a maid, or slipped into a trade delegation—there had been any number of ways in.
The plan going awry left a bitter taste. But if she was being honest with herself, that man wasn't entirely unpleasant.
An opponent she couldn't predict. It had been a long time since she'd met his kind.