Revenge (5)
Revenge (5)
It was not as though I had foreseen absolutely nothing.
I could make my own inferences about the information Alice had uncovered. The memories of that time still sat intact in a corner of my mind, after all.
In particular, forgetting the face of the person who had crushed my face with his fist was no simple matter. If the face under that fist had not been mine, it would certainly have been Claire's, and dwelling on that thought only made it more indelible.
I had made an effort in my own way to track that bastard down. I simply had not enlisted anyone else's help. In other words, unlike Alice, I had not used imperial authority to wrench things open by brute force. I had moved quietly so that no one else would notice.
And I had failed to find him. To be honest, I had not searched for very long. Since he had never been entangled with me in this altered timeline in the first place, I had concluded that tracking him down served no purpose.
But... Alice, it seemed, had reached a slightly different conclusion.
"Do you know this place?"
Gazing at the scenery passing outside the carriage, Alice asked me.
The landscape beyond the window was a beautiful and peaceful territory. There were no poppy fields, no beggars lining the roadside. Most of the people walking about were neatly dressed and looked ordinary.
A stream that could not really be called wide flowed through the area, and a stone bridge crossed it. Beyond the bridge stood rows of uniformly designed brick houses, the kind that always appeared in works set during the Industrial Revolution.
The carriage was heading toward the edge of that residential district. As if the stream served as a boundary, the far side was dense with brick houses while this side remained almost entirely undeveloped grassland.
And I remembered the place.
A little further from here lay a hill. And atop that hill, there would be a single tall tree. The tree might have been cut down by someone, but the hill would still be there.
And it was from that tree that I had watched through a telescope as the count's carriage exploded. I had watched the people inside it become chunks of flesh. I had watched several blameless horses get caught in the blast as well.
No trace of it remained now. Naturally.
The overall layout had not changed much, but the number of brick houses beyond the stream had increased substantially. Some buildings differed from the ones in my memory. The reason I could be certain was that I had already walked through the spaces between those buildings several times. I could even recall the interiors of some buildings with exactness.
Especially that one in the middle, which looked conspicuously better maintained than the others.
I furrowed my brow slightly.
Was that building still... being used for that purpose?
"......."
I was not the only person whose face had hardened. Seated beside Alice, Mia Crowfield's face had gone rigid as well.
Contrary to her somewhat youthful appearance, Mia Crowfield was around the same age as us.
She had been old enough on the day her father died to remember the events clearly, so she would know what sort of place this was.
But she did not say a single word.
She could well have asked why she had been brought to a place like this.
Just as I had anticipated, the carriage came to a stop in front of that well-kept building.
Knights had already established a presence at the entrance. The interior of the building was likely the same. Police officers had also turned out, though they wore expressions suggesting they had no idea what was going on. And beyond those knights and police officers, imperial knights and territorial knights stood in postures that looked like another confrontation.
The imperial knights were fewer in number, but they did not yield in force of presence. Though I had no basis whatsoever for the thought, I even got the sense that if the two sides were to start fighting here and now, the imperial knights would win.
The carriage's ability to arrive here without incident had probably been thanks to that presence.
"Father really is remarkable."
Alice, who had stepped down from the carriage, spoke in a somewhat indifferent voice. Her gaze was fixed on the territory's "knights" locked in a standoff with the imperial knights.
"Letting a territory that obviously despises him build up private soldiers like this."
"...... Crowfield County shares a border with the Kingdom of Belbur."
Mia Crowfield countered Alice's muttering, but Alice merely shrugged and replied.
"That array doesn't exactly look like it's 'supporting' the imperial army."
"......."
Mia Crowfield could not bring herself to argue with that remark.
Yet Alice did not glare at Mia Crowfield or assume a hostile expression. If anything... it would not have been incorrect to say she wore the same expression I had always seen at school.
Indeed, calling it a faintly worried expression would not have been far off.
Alice turned her head and looked up at the building once more. Then she lowered her gaze back toward Mia Crowfield and spoke.
"Inside that building, there will be information you will not want to know."
"I will not want to know?"
At Alice's words, Mia Crowfield glared at Alice ferociously, or at least she tried to, and spoke.
"I heard before coming here that your father, as a father, was far more fatherly than mine."
Alice spoke in a flat tone that concealed her feelings.
"Are you trying to say that my father... that Count Crowfield, was involved in activities contrary to that image?"
Mia Crowfield's expression as she spoke had grown even more ferocious than a moment ago.
I would have acted the same way, I suspected. If my father had done some terrible thing that I did not know about, and in my memories he was simply a gentle, proud father, and on top of that, he had been unjustly murdered.
How would I behave if a person who was, roughly speaking, the daughter of the one who had commissioned that murder, came to me and said, "Your father was not the good man you thought he was"?
... Thinking of it that way, Mia Crowfield genuinely seemed to be exerting every ounce of self-restraint she possessed. Perhaps the imperial princess standing before her and the Imperial Guard Knights surrounding us had helped her maintain that self-restraint.
"Yes."
But Alice answered without any softening whatsoever.
"......."
Mia Crowfield's expression, having passed the peak of ferocity, reset itself. Faced with Alice delivering such words with not a trace of compunction, she seemed to have sensed a sudden unease.
Mia Crowfield had spent the past several months seeing Alice's face and conversing with her. And several months was sufficient time to form a rough judgment of a person's character.
Mia Crowfield would know very well that Alice was not someone who joked about such things.
"Even so, will you come in with us? It could cause you great pain."
"......."
Mia Crowfield's head slowly dipped downward, then abruptly snapped back up.
Her eyes were trembling faintly, and the corners of her mouth had fallen slightly. Her face was far paler than usual.
But the expression on that face was the dignified bearing of a noble.
"Fine."
Mia Crowfield spoke in a voice that was somewhat unsteady.
"If that is how you intend to proceed, then I will not shamefully shrink away. Because my father was never that kind of person."
"......."
Alice exhaled very slightly.
"Good. In that case."
Alice turned and began to walk. I followed, and Mia Crowfield followed behind her.
The knight stationed beside the door opened it for us.
The interior of the building... although it was unquestionably a building with properly installed windows, it was far too dark.
*
The only sounds throughout our walk were the unpleasant creak of the old wooden stairs with every step and the noise of our own footsteps.
If someone inside had been subdued by the knights, we should have heard at least some grumbling, but there was not even that much, leaving me somewhat unsettled.
I could see imperial knights standing at intervals along the narrow corridor. Though they were clad in gear that ought to have produced metallic clanking, they all stood at motionless attention to receive us. The degree of their training was extraordinary.
The smell from the last time I had been here was absent. Fortunately, it did not appear to still be used for "that purpose."
"This way, Your Highness."
In a corner of the second floor, in front of the door to what looked like the smallest room, a knight was standing.
When Alice, I, and Mia Crowfield approached in silence, the knight opened the door for us exactly as he had done when we entered the building.
And inside—
"Well?"
As we stepped into the room, Alice turned her face slightly toward me. She had not turned fully, so her profile concealed her expression, making it difficult to tell exactly what look she wore.
But the contempt in her voice was unmistakably clear.
Inside the room, a middle-aged man lay face-down, pinned beneath a knight's knee. Both arms were drawn behind his back and trapped under the knight's knee as well. Though he appeared fairly old, his build was still robust, but he evidently lacked the strength to push off a hulking muscle-bound figure in plate armor and rise to his feet.
...... When I had seen him during those younger days, he had truly looked terrifying.
A few books lay fallen on the floor—novels that were celebrated here as classical literature.
And beside those books, a single lens from a pair of spectacles lay cracked on the floor.