How the King Will Open the Harvest Festival
David had always had a knack for being well-behaved with beautiful older women. Maybe it was his mother's influence.
In truth, he was quite easy with younger women as well. That was why he was so fidgety around his younger sister me.
“So, I suppose I can just sleep on the kitchen floor.”
“How can you say that? Sleep comfortably in the bed. I’ll share the bed with Father Priest.”
Pitia’s bed was small, but both she and I were slender, so we could easily fit together.
And unlike our modern world, here sharing a bed with strangers was common. That meant sudden companionship with people you barely knew was a frequent occurrence.
In such a world, sharing a bed with Pitia wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.
“No, then what about me and Hamilcar—”
“Say something sensible. It would take both of us to handle one brother.”
David’s face fell.
Pitia had taken excellent care of David after he turned into a sea cucumber, but her first impression had been so powerful that David trembled in fear of her.
David already saw beauties as terrifying beings rather than attractive women, so he was terrified of Pitia and didn’t dare ask me to go home.
He simply patted my shoulder while lamenting that he was unworthy to use my room, then suddenly had an idea and asked, “Want to make a good impression on Father Priest and Damien?”
David nodded. He wanted to impress Pitia. Damien was the last thing on his mind.
“I have a good idea. Want to hear it?”
At those words, David’s eyes lit up.
Outside, a snowstorm raged, but inside it was warm. Orange flames from Damien’s magic gently illuminated the room.
We each took a cup of the honey tea I’d brought and gathered around the small table.
In this atmosphere, a sofa would have been ideal, but since there was no living-room space in the tiny temple, we sat at the table as best we could.
“I left Serpine early… I wanted to see what happened to the wedding between Aud and Serpine…”
Pitia covered her mouth with a hand and asked quietly, “Prince—”
“Call me David.”
“David… did you see the wedding?”
David answered with a firm “Yes,” then suddenly burst into laughter. The three of us stared at him strangely, and he waved his hand dismissively.
“That kind of satisfying wedding will never happen again. The Serpine bastards… ugh, sorry.”
He was smirking when he met Pitia’s eyes and suddenly looked as if he’d been caught with a mouse in front of a cat, apologizing. Pitia smiled brightly.
“No, no. Tell me more. What happened?”
The things I learned from my recent trip to Serpine meant that Pitia, who is quite sociable and skilled at handling people, would benefit from hearing them.
After all, she’d always been like that. Even with our first mark, Jean Corche, Pitia was the one who conversed with him, not me. I was only there to take advantage.
Pitia patted David encouragingly, and he soon perked up and began to describe the wedding between Serpine and Aud in detail.
Meanwhile, Damien, who had been leaning back against the chair with a bored expression, slowly leaned forward toward the table.
The most entertaining part was undoubtedly the moment Izabo officially declared herself the protector of the weak.
Wow, she went that far?
I had advised Izabo to frame herself as a victim of her husband’s rape and to protect him while making Serpine bear the responsibility.
But Izabo went one step further. She proclaimed herself the protector of the weak and rewarded Serpine, the count who protected merchants, by devouring him right in front of everyone.
A merchant-protector who is shamelessly greedy, a victim of betrayal at a sacred wedding, and yet the victim who claims to protect her husband as well and vows to save the pitiful. Where could anyone find moral justification?
“Actually, within the delegation, there were doubts about the husband. He stood at the very front of the crowd, and the way he deliberately tripped and showed himself at the exact moment the Duke of Aud turned around was completely unnatural.”
David’s words made Pitia nod, and Damien looked at me with a subtle gaze. Pitia didn’t know, but Damien did. He knew exactly what I had done.
At the time, the front row of the crowd in front of the temple was reserved for scribes. They wanted to keep the cleanest people there because they had to showcase the Duke of Aud and the envoys.
But the scribes themselves couldn’t have done it all, so of course they ordered their subordinates.
Among the subordinates under scribe Pierre was a junior who had once taken a bribe and then washed his mouth out. Damien blackmailed the junior and forced him to place the husband in the front row.
If bribery didn’t work, he had planned to offer money, but Damien said, “Don’t worry. The payment for what you gave me will be handled.” And he actually did it.
I don’t know how, but it wasn’t a decent method. Perhaps that was the only way.
The junior probably thought he was lucky. He had eaten the saint’s money and washed his mouth, yet he survived.
The husband himself didn’t know why he was allowed to stand in the front row. The junior only placed a woman with a veil on her head, as Damien instructed, so he had no idea what was happening.
By now he must have realized what he had done, but he would never speak of it to anyone.
To confess, he would have to reveal that he had taken a bribe from the saint and washed his mouth, which would lead to an immediate Isekai good-bye.
A suitable person from the temple had acted as the husband’s substitute. The man was incredibly strong and skilled at riding horses, so right after he took the husband’s place, he quickly slipped out of the crowd and escaped to join us who had already left.
Izabo had upgraded my consultation to another level and successfully pulled it off. She then took the husband and leisurely left for Aud.
She claimed it was to save the victim, but in reality she was stealing Serpine’s eternal shame and, at the same time, taking his bloodline.
At that moment, the situation was so dramatic and the crowd’s will so absolute that Serpine failed to reclaim his official bastard and lost him forever.
In a few dozen years, the Duke of Aud would almost certainly use the child to interfere with Serpine’s succession rights. That seed would torment Serpine for a long time to come.
“The Duke of Aud is truly magnificent. He said he has come to understand the will of the gods and plans to open the Harvest Festival.”
When Izabo asked what she wanted as compensation for the consultation, I said I wanted her to open the Harvest Festival.
It seemed Izabo had contacted the merchants at the Serpine Dock specifically to prepare for the festival. Watching her trample Serpine and then harvest even the last fruit was truly the behavior of a ruler.
Demia had demanded that I revive the Harvest Festival that the king would host in exchange for the Sub-space ability.
To revive a Harvest Festival hosted by the king, the king himself had to be the one to open it, or there had to be political gain, or the people had to demand it. One of those three conditions was required.
The king was only a few years older than our father, so his mental health was probably fine, and politically he stood to gain nothing.
He was both the king and one of the great lords of the north. And the north was where magic was extremely powerful. The Magic Tower was located there.
Therefore, even to curry favor with the Magic Tower, he could not ignore the temple’s hand.
But if the people wanted it, if they could obtain public support, then the story would change. The king, the Magic Tower, the temple, the north, the south, and the ruling class—all of them would be like candles in front of the sun in the face of public will. They would not dare show hesitation.
After all, a hierarchical society like this could only exist because the vast majority of people accepted and consented to it.
The Aud Principality was at the height of its popularity right now. Izabo was a woman, and generally that was disadvantageous for her.
Normally, once the scandal broke—that Amori Serpine had placed his mistress before the wedding, impregnated her, and planned to raise the child—the Aud family would have been finished politically.
How could anyone rule a kingdom that had been treated so contemptuously? In the Middle Ages, dignity was life itself. Those without dignity were followed by no one. They weren’t just speaking casually on a stage for the sake of drama.
But Izabo framed herself as the protector of the weak and embraced her husband, becoming a transcendent being rather than a mere human.
In such cases, women held extreme advantage. Motherhood and femininity. When combined with concepts like morality and the sacred, the synergy that exploded from them was impossible to compare to men’s.
Men always held the privilege of power. In other words, even if they performed a holy act, they became people who abandoned what they had and descended to a lower place.
However, women were not part of the privileged class. Izabo was, but at the time she was in an extremely precarious situation.
From that point, Izabo made a decision no ordinary person could imagine. She did not descend to a lower place; she fell from a cliff and grew wings to soar into the sky.
Someone who had everything descending to a lower place? People think that’s amazing? That’s modern sensibility.
Even in the Middle Ages, it was admirable. But the impact was not as great as that of someone who had risen to the heights.
In the Aud Principality, where they opened the Harvest Festival and comforted the people right after the most painful moment for them.
Nothing particularly special happened here. So when festivals like the Harvest Festival occurred, the people went wild with joy.
The temple had quite a few festivals, but as magic rose to dominance, those many festivals all disappeared.
The people became even more depressed. In the midst of that, if the Aud opened a grand Harvest Festival—
What would happen to public sentiment?
Could the king look at it and decide not to open the Harvest Festival?