The Banquet (2)
Before we knew it, three weeks had already slipped by since our arrival in Remington County.
We had overstayed our planned visit by a considerable margin, and only now found ourselves in the peculiar position of finally being invited to a banquet.
The count’s household must be having one hell of a headache.
It was true they had been busy on many fronts, but inviting guests to a banquet three weeks after their arrival was an exceedingly rare occurrence. A territorial war, a period of mourning, an outbreak of plague across the domain, or guests who had somehow managed to thoroughly wear out their welcome… only under circumstances like those did such a delay usually happen. So yes, the situation was decidedly unusual.
How, then, would the count’s family navigate their way out of it?
“Hm.”
I sorted through my thoughts while inspecting the tailcoat the household had prepared for me. Nothing amiss.
“Ready?”
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
My brother and I followed a servant’s guidance toward the banquet hall of the count’s estate.
Whoa…
I had already sensed the difference in scale the moment we first stepped into the castle. But the banquet hall—a space meant to welcome guests directly and to flaunt the family’s prestige—was on an entirely different level from anything a viscount’s house could offer.
Had I possessed a more craven, un-noble temperament, simply walking into that hall might have been enough to cow me.
And then there was the table, every bit as magnificent as the hall that housed it. Place settings by the craftsman Roselin—my mother’s absolute favorite—were laid out as if that were the most natural thing in the world. Candles, decorative stands, and fresh flowers were arranged between the settings with elegant restraint rather than excess. There was no such concept as “negative space” on that table. The lavish decorations existed solely to make the food itself shine.
Appetizers and main courses prepared by a cook of undeniable skill, and desserts so beautiful they could have passed for ornaments in their own right. It was a banquet table that truly proclaimed the autumnal abundance of House Remington.
Perhaps that was why the very richness of it only made the emptiness more glaring.
Excluding the servants, a mere four people were attending this banquet: the hostess herself, Countess Linia; her youngest daughter, Lady Ariella; and the two invited guests—my brother and me.
It was a table far too grand for only four.
This was my first time sitting at such a table. Yet when I closed my eyes, another scene rose unbidden. Our own family sometimes held banquets as well—far smaller and more modest. I hoped that someday the same warm, glittering bustle we knew at home would bloom in this place too. With that thought, I opened my eyes again.
“You have come such a long way, and only now have I been able to arrange this gathering. Truly… I feel I have shown you nothing but shortcomings at every turn.”
The countess began with a wry smile.
“Not at all, my lady. There have been a great many incidents, have there not?”
The words carried a faintly pointed weight.
“Yes. A great many indeed.”
Her gaze shifted from my brother to me. She was almost certainly thinking of the assassination attempt. We chose not to dig any deeper into the matter. Raking over a story already finished could all too easily be read as unnecessary pressure.
“This is my daughter, Ariella.”
“I am Ariella. It is a pleasure to meet you.”
Lady Ariella introduced herself with the graceful poise befitting a noble young lady. She was beautiful. If the countess—once called the flower of high society—were to grow young again, she might look exactly like this. Mother and daughter resembled each other that closely.
The countess had sharp eyes and golden hair paired with blue irises; Lady Ariella had softer eyes and golden hair paired with golden irises. That was about the only difference worth noting.
“A pleasure to meet you, Lady Ariella. I am Aren, eldest son of Viscount Revan’s house, and this is my younger brother, Edwin.”
“I am Edwin.”
We bowed. My brother and I offered the formal greetings expected of noble sons. Once the introductions were finished, we took our seats at the countess’s invitation.
The soft clink of cutlery was barely audible. A quiet banquet began.
Without compromising the dignity of a noble, I enjoyed the feast House Remington had prepared.
Damn, this is good.
The flavor was so superb that such a crude thought rose unbidden. True fine dining—pleasure for both eye and tongue. After weeks of nothing but sickroom fare and bitter, fishy poison pills, I would have licked the sauce from the plate if no one had been watching.
As I savored the meal, my gaze drifted naturally toward Lady Ariella.
Atmosphere alone can make this much difference.
Countess Linia was a radiant woman. Her naturally waved golden hair, cascading to her waist, called to mind a wheat field at harvest. Her appearance, adorned just enough without excess, glittered like a jewel that drew every eye.
Yet Lady Ariella, who took after her mother so completely, was the opposite. If I had to put it into words, she gave the impression of a wild rose—beautiful, but making no effort to display that beauty, and wanting none of the attention that came with it.
The kind of person who looks destined to take losses her whole life.
Imagine a swing set. Three children want to ride it, and Lady Ariella is one of them. When the time comes to decide the order, she will choose last. The first child takes a turn; the second measures the time with ruthless precision and claims their place. And when the second child’s time is up—
Lady Ariella won’t even get a quarter of a turn.
She would never be able to tell the second child, however coldly, to get down. The second child looks so happy on the swing that she decides their happiness is her own, and so she quietly absorbs the loss. Pure and simple as a wild rose—someone for whom the life of a noble did not seem to fit at all. That was my first impression of her.
“….”
Our eyes met. Careful not to commit a breach of etiquette at the banquet table, I offered a slight nod and looked away, then continued my meal in silence while listening to the conversation between my brother and the countess.
“And so, for Ariella’s sixteenth birthday this coming spring—”
The heart of the discussion concerned Lady Ariella’s sixteenth birthday. Most noble young ladies debuted in society around the age of fourteen or fifteen. Lady Ariella, however, would make her first appearance in high society this coming May.
A social debut. It sounded rather grand, and for noble daughters it was a lifelong event they counted down the days toward. In less polished terms, though, it was closer to registering with a high-end matchmaking firm. The better a match one hoped to secure, the more money and time one had to pour into the process—not so different from those agencies after all. The main distinction was that instead of one-on-one pairings, the members gathered together for a ball and socialized en masse.
The most practical solution, then.
Noble marriages cost a fortune, which meant a young lady’s debut also consumed staggering amounts of time and money. There was even a running joke in our family that we were lucky never to have had a daughter. With such a critical and busy undertaking on their hands, the count’s household’s somewhat neglectful treatment of us had been inevitable. They had simply manufactured an acceptable public justification.
It must have been the best choice available…
I could already picture how thoroughly that wild-rose girl would be trampled by others in the process. If one cannot raise one’s own value beyond what is necessary, lowering the value of every other option is another method entirely. A girl who showed no talent as a spirit user would make an excellent target.
“And so this time we are even considering a knight tournament. We intend to hold an event for those who have received Elysion’s blessing no more than two years ago.”
Enter the knight tournament. Where noble young ladies had their social debuts, young noblemen who had received a blessing had these tournaments. Only houses of at least count rank could afford to host such a ruinously expensive spectacle, and it was the stage on which the sons of noble houses displayed their martial prowess. With far more spectacle than a rather plain social debut, a knight tournament drew considerably more attention—exactly the kind of shield that might blunt some of the malice directed at Lady Ariella.
It won’t be enough.
With a tournament being held, an unusually large number of young noblemen would gather. That would keep the young ladies from acting too rashly… but every situation has its variables. Even nobles, at that age of still-immature hot blood, might cause an incident.
Here, a frontal assault was the right approach. Six weeks remained until her dual social debut and knight tournament. Before then, I would make her talent as a spirit user bloom.
Not impossible.
House Remington had many decorations, and among them, of course, hung a portrait of the count. He gave the overall impression of a refined, handsome man with slender features, and his eyes were a green that seemed to hold living greenery within them.
Father: green eyes. Mother: blue eyes. Yet their daughter, Lady Ariella: golden eyes. On top of that, most people contracted with a spirit by fifteen at the latest, and she still had not. Perfect fodder for high society’s gossip mills.
But I knew exactly what this phenomenon was.
Classic symptoms of the UR trait Fairy Eyes. In the game it only appeared when the god of the dice smiled on you…
Path of Guardians began the moment a character was created, with the rite of Elysion’s blessing. Special blessings that required specific conditions were normally locked, but during character creation one could reroll the dice to tweak a character’s “fate” or “personality.” Grant a fairy bloodline, or a history of having killed someone as a slum-born child, and one could receive more unusual blessings such as Spirit User or Assassin.
Among the traits obtainable through dice rerolls, Fairy Eyes ranked as UR by game standards. Only with Fairy Eyes could one contract with beings on the level of the Spirit Kings. The downside was that unless one’s spirit affinity was at least three times that of an ordinary spirit user, one could not even sense the existence of ordinary spirits.
In the game it had hardly been a problem. One simply abandoned every other stat and kept rerolling until the spirit affinity number alone was high enough. Once the blessing was received, the correction values kicked in and the Fairy Eyes penalty became a non-issue.
This was reality, though. No dice rerolls. If she had been born with Fairy Eyes, it was entirely plausible she still could not sense spirits at all.
Worth a try—if she has the will for it.
This was the same countess who had tortured and executed a steward who had served the family for over twenty years. A woman of that steel would never treat Lady Ariella so gently if the girl were the product of an affair. I would place my bets on Fairy Eyes and attempt the spirit-affinity training methods I had learned from the game.
First step, though… getting close to her.
Raising her spirit affinity actually felt easier than this part.
The day after the banquet, with the countess’s permission, I was allowed to join Lady Ariella for tea.
“Thank you for making time for me, Lady Ariella.”
“Not at all. I had been hoping for a chance to speak with you personally, Sir Edwin.”
That made things easier on my end as well.
“Is it because of the rumors that I received the Guardian’s blessing?”
“Yes. I had heard that the Guardian’s blessing is a trial of hardship and adversity almost too much for a person to bear.”
She was right. Thanks to that, I had been called a “Great Warrior” at the Cretus Church and even received a seal that served as identification.
“Why did you choose the Guardian’s blessing? You seem nothing like the rumors, Sir Edwin.”
From where we sat drinking tea, we could see the knight trainees of House Remington at practice. If she took tea here often, she might well have witnessed the moment I ran up a twenty-three-win streak against those trainees.
“It was neither chance nor whim. I simply obtained a secret technique that is… difficult to explain to others. That is how I would put it.”
Lady Ariella’s expression shifted through a colorful range of emotions, ending in the hesitation of someone about to ask a question she knew was improper.
“That… setting yourself on fire—was that also part of the secret technique?”
Sir Kaiden, then.
She spoke carefully, eyes on the crest on the back of my hand. In this world a crest that revealed one’s abilities appeared on the back of the hand, so most people covered it with armor or gloves. But as invited guests at a banquet, we had removed our gloves as a gesture of courtesy. Seeing the mark on my hand and hearing about my unbelievable rate of growth, it was only natural she would be curious. And so she had pried the details from Sir Kaiden, who had accompanied me into the dungeon under the pretext of serving as my guardian and had grown rather familiar with me in the process.
“Please don’t misunderstand. I… I was simply that desperate…”
She answered in a murmur, glancing away from my gaze.
Desperate, she says.
A word heavy with feeling.
“I don’t misunderstand. If I were in your place, Lady Ariella, I would have done the same.”
“Thank you. For being so considerate…”
I sipped my tea, watching from the corner of my eye as she continued to shrink into herself.
“If you ask whether setting myself on fire was a secret technique—yes. That too was a kind of secret technique.”
An efficient growth method counted as a secret technique here. By this world’s standards, Slash-and-Burn Farming was a perfectly respectable secret technique.
“Weren’t you afraid? Even for a Guardian, famous for durability, setting yourself on fire must have been terribly dangerous and painful.”
“I’m only human. Of course I felt fear. Of course I flinched.”
“And yet you still did it? According to Sir Kaiden, you didn’t even need to use a technique like that.”
“But it would have taken a very long time.”
I looked at her directly.
“Suppose you, Lady Ariella, could contract with a spirit around the age of twenty. But if you endure a little pain now, you could commune with spirits immediately. Which path would you choose?”
A brief silence fell.
“…I think I would set myself on fire too.”
She spoke the words I had hoped to hear.
“Because I’m so inadequate… Mother suffers so much because of me. She has done nothing wrong, and the whole family is in such a difficult place—at the very least I, who am still healthy, should be able to help her…”
Her head was bowed; her shoulders trembled. Beneath the table her hands clenched the fabric of her skirt so tightly that the feelings she had been stuffing down into a vessel called the heart looked ready to spill over.
They were emotions that needed to be poured out, yet she had no family left who could receive her pain. Her father had set everything down and withdrawn from the world. Her mother was fighting desperately to protect the house from the wolves circling it. The eldest son lay bedridden with an unknown illness. There had been no one she could confide in.
Even so, she mastered her emotions in the end and did not let a single tear fall.
She’s strong.
Just as my first impression had suggested, she was the kind of person who would take losses her whole life. Most people who fell behind others and became the subject of gossip either drowned in self-loathing and inferiority or simply gave up. She felt guilt instead. She believed her family was being hurt because she was not enough. Even as the emotions she had crushed down threatened to drown her, she forced them back for the sake of her family first. It was a soft, yielding nature that did not suit a noble—someone who might, if necessary, have to steel herself to kill.
And yet she also possessed the strength to set herself on fire if it would protect her family. A wild rose is still a rose. She was someone ready to raise every thorn on her body if it meant defending the one thing she would never surrender.
In that case…
“What would you say if I told you I possessed a secret technique for awakening a spirit user’s talent?”
“A technique for awakening a spirit user’s talent?”
“Yes. I make this proposal on the honor of House Revan. If you, Lady Ariella, will swear upon your family’s name, and if you can trust me and follow me to the end… I will share my secret technique with you. Of course, this is a secret you must not share even with your own family.”
Her gaze fell upon the crest of the Guardian’s blessing engraved on the back of my hand.
“Upon the honor of House Remington, I will trust you and follow you, Sir Edwin. I leave myself in your care.”
A moment later an unwavering, resolute light filled her eyes as she looked at me—the eyes of someone who had truly prepared herself to set her own body on fire for her family’s sake.
“Then I look forward to working with you.”
“Yes. I look forward to it as well.”
It’s going to be brutally hard, but you’ll just have to grit your teeth and endure through pure spite and stubbornness.
I rolled those words around in my mouth and swallowed them whole.
“Um, Sir Edwin?”
“Yes, Lady Ariella.”
“I know I already said I would do it, so it feels a bit wrong to say this now, but…”
“Speak freely.”
“This… this… really doesn’t seem right…”
Water poured in a steady stream.
“Th-this really isn’t… it doesn’t seem right…”
Lady Ariella, buried in the earth up to her neck like some sort of human plant, with only her head sticking out. And Edwin, calmly watering that human plant’s head from a watering can.
A scene that would have made the countess shriek and declare a territorial war was being carried out under the proud name of a “secret technique.”