Warning Shot
Boom!
The sound was closer to an explosion than a mere noise. Siena, who had gone to bed early after enduring an unpleasant outing with Marcel, shot upright in bed.
What on earth—!
Her heart hammered against her ribs as the floor vibrated with the shockwave and screams erupted from the street outside.
She slid quickly out of bed, straightened her slippers, and gathered the strap of her nightgown that had slipped down her shoulder. She was just about to hurry to the window.
Knock knock!
"Siena!"
Frozen in place, she turned her head toward the door.
Claude?
Bang!
"Siena, wake up!"
At the urgency in his voice, she snatched the robe from the hanger and opened the door. He was impeccably dressed even at this late hour, as though he'd just returned from official business.
His gaze swept over her disheveled face, her tangled hair, and the room behind her.
"There was an explosion in the nearby waters. Come outside for now—it's dangerous."
"Just a moment. Let me change."
Closing the door behind her, Siena rushed to open the wardrobe. Beyond the window, the murmur of the crowd and the wail of sirens were steadily growing louder.
Hands shaking with panic, she dragged whichever clothes her fingers found first onto her arms, gasping for breath.
An explosion? An explosion in the waters?
She had just finished changing and was about to open the door again.
As she reached toward the vanity for a hair tie, a sharp whistle of something slicing through the air cut past her ear.
She took an involuntary step forward—
Crash! Thunk!
An arrow burst through the window and buried itself in the wardrobe.
Her senses went numb. Shards of broken glass scattered the lamplight in a dizzying shimmer.
Outside, someone had evidently heard the commotion; the knocking grew frantic, but the sound drifted far beyond the edge of her consciousness.
Her mind refused to process what was unfolding before her eyes. Her eyelids trembled.
"This is... what...?"
Paper.
There was paper tied to the arrow's shaft.
With trembling hands, Siena touched the paper caught on the arrow.
This is...
Clutching at her consciousness as it threatened to dissolve, she spread the paper open. Across it sprawled a warning—one that denounced Perensa.
And it wasn't just one sheet. Two, three pages, filled with the names of everyone Perensa was currently in contact with, along with photographs and transcripts of their conversations. Her hands shook. The blood drained from her face.
How?!
Knock knock!
"Siena!"
She, who had been holding her breath, gathered the scattered papers against her chest and heaved a great, ragged breath.
"Siena!"
Every sound reverberated somewhere outside her mind. Clapping a hand over her mouth, Siena sank to the floor in a huddle, gasping.
"Siena Vice!"
Her uncle's thunderous scolding flickered before her eyes. She could feel the whispers—she doesn't know her place—closing in from every direction.
The insatiable greed that had started this entire hell!
A mother who had coveted the throne her whole life. A father who chased endlessly at her mother's back.
And...
Siena's eyes darted restlessly through the empty air.
Hasar—her brother, who clung to absolute perfection just to keep that precarious scales of suspicion balanced.
"No. No."
It would be fine. It was going to be fine.
Mother knew nothing.
Not once since that day had Siena ever let her guard down where her mother was concerned.
Ever since the Succession Law Reform bill was first proposed, unidentified visitors had been coming and going from the Count's estate, and they had attempted covert contact with her several times as well.
So she had eliminated every last one of them—determined to leave nothing in this world that could threaten her, Hasar, or House Vice.
And yet—look how careless she had been. How naive. The angle of the photographs was one that could only have been taken at close range.
The texture of the paper beneath her fingertips, too, was nothing ordinary.
High nobility, then. Possibly someone on the inside.
Her teeth chattered.
In the end, she had failed—both to watch over Perensa and to protect her.
Siena's fingernails scraped roughly across the paper's surface. Fury rose in her brimming eyes.
In the photographs, her mother was smiling radiantly.
Nausea welled up from somewhere deep inside. It was almost a wonder to her, the boundless engine that drove the woman—how could she be so relentlessly ambitious while holding nothing at all in her hands?
But still. It would be fine.
Her grandfather's personal testament was safely locked away in the vault.
Calm down. It's fine.
Pressing a hand to her pounding heart, Siena forced her breathing steady.
"Siena—Cici!"
At the voice beyond the door, she snapped back to herself, hastily shoved the documents beneath the mattress, and opened the door.
Claude strode into the room, took her by the arm, and pulled her backward as he spoke.
"Are you all right?"
Even as he asked after her, he swept the room with long, rapid strides.
The wardrobe with its clothes strewn in disarray, the desk still littered with the papers she'd been rifling through near midnight, all the way to the shattered window.
"Mm."
"You look pale."
She dodged the hand rising toward her face and stepped back.
"I'm fine. Could you go down to the first floor and check what's happening?"
Claude studied her for a moment, then tugged at the arm he was holding.
"I'll go and come back. Wait in my room."
"No. I'll stay here."
"Cici."
Forcing her chin up each time it threatened to drop, Siena finally gave in.
"...All right."
With that, he vanished in an instant. Siena stepped slowly out into the corridor and stared down the silent third-floor hallway. Screams and weeping swirled up from below the central staircase—and yet here, only silence.
There was surely something more she ought to be thinking through, but her mind simply refused to turn.
Approaching the open door, Siena turned the handle carefully. It was the very room she'd stayed in only two days ago.
With her thoughts still hazy, she entered slowly and lowered herself to the edge of the bed.
Just then, from somewhere far off, she heard it: A shell! Extra! Extra!
Only one kingdom bordered the Aldo Empire closely enough to lob a warning shell at it in the middle of the Founding Festival: Chante.
A shell, and a warning letter.
A shell from the Kingdom of Chante—and documents about Perensa.
"What could these possibly have to do with each other?"
Siena murmured to herself, her face drained white.
A warning strike from a neighboring nation during the Founding Festival was an extraordinarily rare event—precisely because it could so easily spiral into open conflict.
The Emperor? The Empress? Or is someone trying to win me over? Is it a warning?
It was around the time the thought crystallized—that this threat had been, to some degree, foreseen—that the sirens finally fell silent.
"...Huh?"
Only then did it register, too, that he had dropped formalities with her.
* * *
"Siena, I heard your room was a wreck."
"It's fine. I cleaned it up."
"And the window—they said it was shattered. Are you hurt anywhere?"
"Just a bit of shock, mostly. The repairman came by today, so it should be fixed by now."
Hasar, who had been tied up at the garrison all day, had finally summoned Siena to the officers' quarters.
He'd sent one of his men to escort her from the hotel, and from the moment they met, his worries spilled out without end.
"Family can stay in the officers' quarters. It's cramped, but—do you want to stay here? There's a room free."
"It would be a bother to you, Oppa."
"I'm on permanent emergency duty anyway. As long as you're all right with it, you're welcome to stay, Siena."
Siena weighed his set expression and his earnest offer, and in the end shook her head.
She couldn't shake the premonition that whoever was behind those documents might come looking for her—and she couldn't ignore it.
"I'm fine. Don't worry."
She flashed as bright a smile as she could muster at her brother, who kept pressing his concerns on her.
She had no intention—not the slightest—of dragging him into this.
* * *
Back at the hotel, Siena found Claude drinking coffee in the lobby lounge.
She marveled briefly that he could still stomach the stuff at a time like this—then her steps stopped short.
Why didn't I think of it before? If anyone's suspicious, it's Claude Marcel, first and foremost.
He had appeared utterly out of nowhere, spoken to her, offered unsolicited advice, tossed out playful remarks, and extended favors with no reason behind them.
It was the first change in eight years. If he'd wanted to, he could have approached her far more naturally at any point during that time. But he hadn't.
He had drawn his line against her with rigorous precision and met her with the expression of a wax doll. It had rankled—so she had treated him colder than anyone else treated him, in turn.
Her gaze fell to his head bowed over the low table.
He was spinning a pen back and forth across his fingers, as if lost in thought—the habit looked at once familiar and strangely foreign.
It was a habit of his she'd glimpsed now and then in childhood.
"You look idle. Shouldn't you be busy?"
In the end, Siena took the seat across from him.
He met her eyes, gave her a single impassive glance, and fixed his gaze back on the papers.
"Did you have a pleasant visit with Lord Hasar?"
"Mm. Though visiting hours were short. The emergency alert has everyone in a frenzy, it seems. And you? Busy?"
"Only matters requiring my signature. The Founding Festival's been canceled."
Siena gave a small laugh at his flat reply and turned her head to the window. The streets were in disarray.
The startled nobles had hurried back to the Imperial Capital, to their home provinces, and the tourists who'd made nearby cities their base of operations had rapidly cleared out of Gaverum.
In the space of a day, the city had gone quiet as the grave.
"By the way—about the arrow."
The man who had shown not the slightest interest in her suddenly spoke up.
He'd let the words fall casually, offhand, his eyes still pinned to the documents in his hand.
A brief silence followed.
"What was tied to it?"
Siena stopped breathing.