A Knight in the Herb Shop

One hour earlier.

"Good night, Celine."

"Good night to you too, Your Highness!"

Celine checked my bed one last time before slipping out of the bedchamber. The door clicked fully shut, and the sound of her adorable little footsteps quickly faded into the distance.

Once she was well and truly gone, I glanced at the clock on the wall. Midnight was already slipping past.

Perfect. Time to get moving.

I sprang out of bed and pulled on the gray cloak I'd prepared in advance. I donned gloves that swallowed my arms entirely, tugged the hood down deep, and wound a thin scarf around myself until only my eyes showed.

A flawless disguise.

Even I can't tell who I am looking at me!

After checking my reflection in the mirror one more time, I carefully cracked open the bedchamber door and slipped out. I retraced in my head the routes I'd committed to memory while touring the palace with Celine that day. Watching the patrol cycles of the guards on duty, I stealthily made my way to the last room on the western end of the first floor and eased inside.

Whew.

Click. I shut the door behind me and took a slow look around the empty room. It was cold, the kind of chill that settles into a place left vacant far too long.

This room will stay empty until Floria awakens, won't it.

Right. In the original story, this was the room where Floria—freshly awakened as a saintess—would hide away for a time. And when the Imperial Palace came under attack, it was through this room's secret passage that she escaped to the back of the capital's plaza, into the abandoned chapel. Even Crown Prince Cain had no idea the passage existed until then.

Who would've thought I'd be the first to use a passage I only ever read about as ink on a page.

I approached the neglected fireplace, its fire long dead, and reached deep into the cold interior. My fingertips brushed against rough brickwork.

I think it was around here…

Just as I was feeling along the fireplace wall, concentrating every scrap of sensation into my fingertips, one brick—protruding ever so slightly—caught against my hand. I pressed down hard on it, and with a low, grinding rumble, the enormous bookshelf beside the fireplace slid silently backward.

A passage black as pitch yawned open, just wide enough for a grown adult to squeeze through.

Whoa!

I let out a short gasp of awe and threw myself into the passage without a moment's hesitation.

And that, dear reader, is how I emerged from the tunnel and arrived at my current location: a herb shop tucked into a back alley of the Capital.

"Grandfather, this one's wrong too. This isn't a stomach remedy, it's a laxative. Are you trying to kill someone?!"

I was sweating buckets, helping the elderly owner of the herb shop sort through his mess of a shop.

"I'd stay up all night sorting these for you, but I have to head back soon myself."

"Just come back tomorrow and help again. You ought to have that much attachment to the shop!"

It's YOUR shop, Grandfather?!

"Oh dear, you're right, aren't you?"

The old man chuckled and stroked his beard. His airheaded reply finally broke me, and I burst out laughing.

Which was precisely the moment it happened.

"Shopkeeper."

A low voice dropped from above my head as I crouched beneath the shelves, sorting herbs from poison plants. Two men in all-black garb, their identities hidden beneath hoods and masks, were looking down at us.

They looked enormously suspicious, but this kind of back-alley herb shop saw plenty of customers who came to buy herbs with their statuses concealed, so there was nothing particularly strange about it. After all, I myself had changed my voice and hidden my face entirely.

As it happened, the old man had clearly been waiting for them, and he rose to his feet with obvious delight.

"Well, well! You've arrived! Come, let's go upstairs and talk. I've been waiting with my neck craned for ages."

The old man hurried ahead and led one of the men toward the narrow wooden staircase leading to the second floor.

I stared after him, utterly dumbfounded, poking my head out from under the shelf.

"Excuse me, Grandfather! What about all these herbs?"

What about ME?!

"I'll be right back! Keep at it!"

Laughing heartily, the old man vanished up the stairs with zero sense of responsibility.

Well, I never.

Anyone would think I was the granddaughter of this household.

I crouched back down and was dusting the dirt off my hands when the other man—the one who hadn't gone upstairs, who'd been standing blankly by the door—took a quiet step toward me.

"Do you remember me?"

"…Huh?"

I looked up from my crouch, one hand holding my scarf in place over my face. Who is this? His voice, muffled as it was by the mask, was hard to make out.

Though honestly, the same went for me. I was wrapped up in everything except my eyes in case any watcher had followed me. With a scarf even thicker than a mask wound round and round beneath my eyes, not only my face but my voice would be nearly impossible to place.

And yet someone recognized me enough to strike up a conversation?

Suspicious!

I fixed him with a look of maximum wariness. Don't tell me he's from Bilote Village? Or someone the guild sent?!

But the moment our eyes met—

Odd. I really do feel like I've seen him somewhere before…

Beneath the shadow of his hood were alluring yet sharply arrogant eyes, and within them, deep, cold black irises rippling with curiosity. As I stared into that gaze brimming with interest in me, the face felt inexplicably, intensely familiar.

Then it came back to me all at once.

"Ah!"

I shot to my feet and exclaimed, "The tree!"

The sharp eyes curved, ever so faintly. "The one who climbed the tree was you, not me."

"That's right! It was! Wow, you actually remember that?"

"It was a rather striking scene."

His answer was dry, and yet it played along with the joke, and for some reason I felt a spark of inner camaraderie as I smiled with my eyes. "We meet again."

"Are you a Capital native?"

"No."

"The North, then?"

"Mm."

I fell briefly silent at his question. It occurred to me, anew, that I wasn't in any position to declare exactly where I was from. I couldn't exactly mention my hometown of Bilote Village, and the Grand Duchy where I currently resided wasn't my home either. I could only shrug.

"I haven't really settled anywhere. I travel all over looking for herbs."

At my answer, the man nodded. "An herbalist, then. Did you formally study herbology?"

I shook my head. "No. I never had proper training. I'm more the hands-on type who learns by falling on my face. And I'm sure you know—it's hardly easy for a woman to study herbology formally. In this Empire, I mean," I added.

Money was one obstacle, but in the Castillo Empire, it was all but impossible for a commoner woman to study herbs at all. What else would explain how commoner women with even a modest knowledge of herbs, poison plants, and potions were branded witches and put to death? In fact, that was exactly how I'd ended up abandoned in the mountains.

As I let my eyes fall with quiet bitterness, the man's gaze dimmed almost imperceptibly—whether he'd grasped my meaning or not, I couldn't tell.

"Because of such narrow-minded attitudes, finding talented people with real knowledge of herbs has become very difficult."

"Exactly! That's precisely what I've been saying!"

I nodded vigorously, then grinned slyly. "You're surprisingly reasonable, aren't you? Tell me—do you like herbs?"

"My line of work keeps me close to them."

Ooh! I asked eagerly, "If it's not too rude to ask, what do you do?"

"…"

The man deliberated for the briefest of moments. "I'm a knight."

"Oh! How impressive! A knight! I knew something set you apart!"

Well-built and broad-framed—no wonder!

I clapped my hands before I could stop myself, and he asked in return, sounding genuinely taken aback, "…Is it impressive?"

I answered with total sincerity. "Of course it is! Knighthood is the sublime summit of effort that shatters every limit! The crystallization of grit and endurance forged in the teeth of loneliness!"

"…"

At my resolute answer, the man fell silent for a moment.

I brushed herb dust from my fingertips as I went on. "Anyone can grip a sword. But I know it's a place not just anyone can reach."

A life of sprinting across battlefields while everyone else rests, spending a lifetime being someone's bulwark even if it means breaking their own body.

"People who grind up their own todays for the sake of another's tomorrows. That's why I think knighthood is more admirable than any high position in the world."

"…"

The man said nothing in response to my words.

I tugged the scarf—which had slipped a little—back up beneath my eyes and laughed awkwardly. "You must use healing potions and antidotes a lot. So that's why you said your work keeps you close to herbs."

"That's right."

"You go out and gather the herbs yourself?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"Oh, that's grueling work if you don't know your herbs cold!"

"I can tell herbs and poison plants apart to a reasonable degree."

"Then this is perfect! Give me a hand with this!"

"…"

"Look, the old man who runs this shop has terrible eyesight, so his sorting is a complete disaster, you see?"

I dragged the man over to a corner beneath the shelves and forcibly drafted him into sorting herbs with me.

In truth, I'd done nearly all the sorting already, and the man simply listened quietly as I explained each herb. Along the way, he occasionally let slip pieces of his own story.

He spoke matter-of-factly of moments in battle when herbs had meant everything—of mutated monster venom, of wounds that would have been fatal, of the brutal life of a knight.

And I, for my part, launched into an enthusiastic lecture on the rare herbs that grew across every corner of the continent, North and South alike, and how best to combine them for battle or emergencies.

It was astonishing how well we conversed.

The man never brushed my words aside. He listened in silence, asked follow-up questions where it mattered, and even seemed genuinely impressed by what I knew of herbs.

The more we talked, the warmer something deep in my chest felt. For this one moment at least, I wasn't the fake Princess Delmar—I was simply breathing as Evelyn, the herbalist.

Given the chance, I could have talked with this man until dawn.

Which perhaps meant I'd been lonely all on my own in this unfamiliar world far more than I'd realized.

Then it happened.

BOOM—!!

A tremendous crash erupted from the second floor.