The Noble Race
The banner fluttered as a girl appeared with a hardened expression.
The moment I saw Izabo Aud, I nearly whistled. (If I had, my head would have been sliced clean off. The other party was the Duchess of Aud, after all.)
Izabo was an impossibly beautiful young woman with vivid green eyes and lemon-blonde hair. In a word, she possessed the kind of looks that made her the female counterpart to Damien.
I had heard a few stories about Izabo Aud, but none of them had mentioned that she was this breathtakingly beautiful, so I was momentarily stunned.
Even when I first saw Damien, it had been hard to regain my composure. Since Izabo was a woman on top of that, her beauty struck the eyes with almost violent force.
They said Izabo Aud resembled her mother…
I had also heard that the Duke of Aud had walked the path of a eunuch because he could not forget Izabo’s mother. Looking at her now, it was entirely believable.
Her appearance made it clear why the duke had mourned his departed wife so bitterly and loved his daughter—who so closely resembled her—to the point of madness.
With beauty like this, status hardly seemed necessary. And yet, with that kind of status, such beauty was almost superfluous.
Izabo possessed both. She was an extraordinary woman.
That same Izabo stared at Pythia with a rigid face.
Her voice trembled slightly as she spoke, then she slowly approached Pythia and offered her respects first.
At once, Izabo’s maids all knelt on the floor, crossed both hands over their hearts, and bowed their heads deeply in reverence.
Izabo did not even glance in my direction. It was only natural. In her life, I was nothing more than an extra.
The reason I did not greet Izabo was because I was currently being treated as one with Pythia. In other words, I was not granted a separate identity.
“Saintess, I am truly grateful for today’s sermon. When I was young, my father wished to send me to the Temple of Gerka for lessons, but I was born frail and could not go. To meet you like this today is an honor. May I ask for your blessing?”
Though Izabo spoke a little quickly, her tone remained steady. She deliberately raised her voice and enunciated each word clearly, as if making sure someone could hear.
Only then did it occur to me that Izabo might be under surveillance.
Izabo led Pythia and me to the prayer room prepared in the guest quarters.
To be precise, she had wanted to take only Pythia inside, but when Pythia said,
Izabo had no choice but to allow me as well.
Since she had urgent matters she wanted to discuss immediately, she apparently had no patience to argue over whether a disciple could enter the prayer room or not.
The prayer room was small and tucked away in a corner. Two small windows sat high up on the wall.
By now it was already late afternoon, so when the door closed, the interior was swallowed by gray shadows.
While the head maid lit the candles, Izabo walked to the door and pulled a necklace from inside her dress. She then manipulated the locket attached to it and swiftly wrote something.
What hung from the necklace was a thin, long cylindrical object. Every time Izabo moved her hand, glowing red letters appeared and vanished.
Not satisfied with doing the four cardinal directions, Izabo repeated the action on the floor and even the ceiling. Since she could not reach the ceiling, she had to climb onto the table.
It was an act that could damage the dignity of a duchess, yet Izabo showed no hesitation.
Finally, Izabo spoke.
Oh. Some kind of anti-eavesdropping magic item?
It seemed Izabo had brought the magical item from the start. She carefully tucked the necklace back inside her dress and looked at Pythia.
Pythia turned to look at me. I had no choice but to step forward.
Normally, I should have introduced myself as the daughter of Count Raymond Danier, the former Royal Chamberlain.
But if I said that, Izabo would probably burn with genuine fury.
Her political marriage to the royal family had fallen through, she had come to Serpine to make them pay, only to end up being the one humiliated—and the person informing her of this was the daughter of the king’s right-hand man, the chamberlain? Could a noblewoman as proud as Izabo truly endure such an insult?
Izabo silently accepted my greeting. It was the kind of acceptance that said she had no choice because she needed the information. I spoke to her carefully.
Izabo ground her teeth.
She clenched her fists and trembled for a moment before barely managing to hold herself together. A commoner mistress—how utterly filthy!
She wanted to drag Amori Serpine out and beat him to a pulp right then and there, but she knew she could not.
At the same time, a cold rationality began to turn in her mind. It seemed this saintess and her disciple already knew who the commoner woman was.
If she could confirm the woman’s identity and secure testimony, Izabo would no longer need to remain in Serpine.
She could demand the penalty stipulated in the marriage contract for Amori Serpine’s infidelity. That would allow her to enter a state of legal separation.
It would open a path where she could form an alliance with Serpine while never leaving Aud and while still maintaining her influence over her vassals.
She would feel like killing him every time she saw Amori Serpine’s face, but when weighing the practical benefits, it was not a bad—
Now even the practical benefits had vanished. The mistress was pregnant, and the child in her belly was a boy.
Actually, this was for the best. She no longer needed to swallow her rage for the sake of Aud.
The head maid collapsed to her knees on the floor and began to sob loudly.
Pythia watched Izabo as she cursed Amori Serpine and the entire Serpine family with the intent to kill them all, then slowly approached and patted her shoulder. She whispered to Izabo.
Izabo lifted her eyes to look at Pythia. After gazing into Pythia’s benevolent eyes, Izabo eventually let out a fierce laugh as if she had understood, and said,
With that, a temporary alliance was formed between Pythia and Izabo.
While I explained to Izabo Aud how tomorrow’s wedding ceremony would proceed, Damien visited the priests staying at an inn in the city.
Because of their commoner status, they had not been invited to the count’s residence like us. However, the priests staying at the inn were far from idle.
When Damien appeared, Anselm welcomed him warmly, ushered him into the room, and hurriedly locked the door.
This was possible because Anselm and the nine priests had rented an entire room for themselves.
During his stay, Damien had visited Anselm and the priests whenever he had time.
Of course, the moment Damien left the count’s residence alone, the count’s men naturally followed him. But they soon withdrew obediently. The heir of Hamilcar and an Eternal-ranked mage had acted as if he would burn any tail to death.
And according to the long-standing conflict between the North and South, that was not strange at all. In the end, the count gave up on tailing Damien.
The first task had been to find out where Amori Serpine’s mistress lived and who her household members were.
The priests of the Demia Temple had already uncovered everything before nightfall.
They were priests. Traditionally, priests were elites by day and spies by night.
Armed with the fanatic mental discipline granted under divine protection, they spared no means to achieve their goals.
Because they were such people, they quickly spread various words in the name of the gods and let slip things like “There seems to be something unclean,” and the locals willingly interpreted what the “unclean thing” was.
After all, there were few things as unclean as an unmarried woman carrying the illegitimate child of a man who was about to be married.
The woman herself had not thought she could become Amori Serpine’s wife, but she seemed to have been intoxicated by the sweet dream that she might at least become the mother of the next Count of Serpine.
She was proud of having conceived a child and, even while knowing it should be hidden, had been subtly revealing it.
If someone bumped into her, she would dramatically clutch her belly with both hands, scream, and collapse. It was impossible not to notice.
And she had also been spreading rumors—quite openly by medieval standards, though she probably thought she was being subtle—that the child’s father was a man of the Serpine family.
Since she carried the child of the lord’s family, people could not openly point fingers at her. But behind her back, vicious gossip flowed without end.
To priests, people felt they could say anything. Even the ugly thoughts in their hearts could be poured out freely to a priest. After all, a priest was not a person, but a child of God.
They were the medium that delivered people’s words to God and returned God’s forgiveness to people.
—Or so it was easy to think. But Anselm and his priests were nothing like that.
Above all, they were all men of the South. They were extremely proactive in digging up flaws in a great northern house.
The North and South stood at opposite ends of a scale. When the North went down, the South rose.
That had been the long-standing unwritten rule of this land where Morihan and kingdoms of other names had existed.
While offering blessing prayers to those around them, Anselm and the priests learned that Amori Serpine had secretly provided his mistress with a house, servants, and even a wet nurse—without his father, Count Serpine, knowing. A wet nurse meant he intended to raise the child.
Even though they knew the priests were outsiders from the South—or rather, precisely because of that—people freely reported every single move the mistress made. They even blurted out things they would never have said to a Serpine native.
After all, one never knew how a Serpine person might be connected. But a Hamilcar person was practically from another world by medieval standards. There was nothing they could not say.
The mistress went to the temple every day to pray for the child. The temple where she prayed was the Temple of Aira, goddess of home and marriage.
Anselm visited the nearby Demia Temple, exchanged the customary greetings, then left a little early and waited for the mistress so he could encounter her.
He stared intently at her belly, which she was hiding beneath loose clothing, and smiled sadly.
“……”
At those words, the mistress clung to Anselm.
Ever since she had become pregnant, she had lived only among people who denied the child, denied her future, or tried to hide that they were denying it. This was the first person who had affirmed both her and her child’s future.
Moreover, he was wearing priestly robes. He was a priest who possessed divine power.
The mistress let out a loud wail right there in the street (probably because of pregnancy hormones, though she herself could never have known that). Anselm quickly took her to a secluded place.
Sobbing, she begged him.
To an outsider, it would have looked truly pitiful. But Anselm knew very well that this woman harbored the ambition of using the child of a man with a fiancée to elevate herself into the nobility.
Anselm clicked his tongue and shook his head, saying there was nothing he could do.
Yet the more Anselm withdrew with eyes full of pity, the more desperately the mistress clung to him. In the end, with a reluctant expression, Anselm held out a single silk lace.
The moment the woman heard those words, she snatched the lace from his hand. It was almost a seizure. Her face remained sorrowful, but her gesture could not hide her greed.
Looking down at her, Anselm declared calmly.