A Mark on the Arrow Shaft
"There's a mark left on the arrow shaft."
The breath she'd been holding leaked out thin between her lips. The hand hanging loose at her side tightened into a fist.
For all that the man was lounging here like this now, he was someone who spent most of his waking hours uncovering fraud and pressing charges.
Stay calm.
"It could have come loose from something that was tied up. You saw it yourself — the room was a complete wreck."
At that tactless answer, Claude tapped the paper with his pen nib. Lost in thought, he kept his head bowed toward the table.
"...Right. It was a wreck," he said, lifting his head as though exhaling the words. Siena nodded back with a perfectly composed face.
"But there was nothing there, was there? You checked it yourself just yesterday."
The pale amber eyes studying him gleamed with an intelligence that seemed unusually sharp.
The delicate features tucked beneath that golden braided updo were refined and elegant — and yet, for all their gentleness, the whole impression carried a blade's edge somewhere beneath the surface.
Claude stared at that face for a moment, then lowered his gaze back to the table. It was fleeting, but he could feel it clearly: the solid wall Siena had raised between them.
"There will be an additional on-site investigation by the military tomorrow. A request came in saying there's something that needs verifying."
"Verifying?"
Caught off guard by the unexpected news, her voice rang out sharply.
"Yes. The visit is scheduled for tomorrow morning."
"The investigation was finished yesterday. What else is there to verify?"
Her tone was irritable, as if the sudden notice had rattled her.
"A foreign military provocation struck the city in the middle of the Founding Festival. Two members of the imperial family were present, and one of them was directly threatened — was she not?"
"She was not. No— fine, yes. An arrow flew in and lodged itself somewhere, but nothing actually happened."
When she answered with a scornful little laugh, he cut her off, his voice firm.
"Only because luck was on her side. The arrow's trajectory passed directly in front of the vanity."
At that, Siena, who had been opening and closing her lips a few times, quietly shut her mouth.
When exactly did he check the trajectory?
Wariness rose before anything else at his thoroughness. He'd calculated the arrow's angle in all that chaos?
Watching her hesitate, unable to refuse outright, Claude drove the wedge in deeper.
"It's a formality. I know it's an inconvenience, but I ask for your cooperation."
"...Then why aren't you the one doing it?"
At the curt question, Claude let out a soft laugh and set the documents he was holding neatly on the table.
"Well, I happen to be busy with other matters."
At the crack of dawn, the moment her eyes opened, a military inspector and an administrative officer were knocking at her door.
At any decent hotel, the comings and goings of outsiders were strictly managed by the staff. All the more so for a member of the imperial family.
There had been no advance notice to begin with — even yesterday's verbal warning had rubbed her the wrong way — and now they were pounding on her door out of nowhere. It was barely seven o'clock. At the sheer unpleasantness of it, Siena's gaze went cold as frost.
"Forgive the intrusion. It is a terribly early hour, after all."
Having prepared herself at a deliberately leisurely pace, she finally opened the door a full hour later.
In the doorway, she looked the two men over with an icy stare. One, she was told, was an inspector attached to the military; the other, an administrative officer sent by the Margrave of Gaverum.
"Not at all — thank you for receiving us. May we come in?"
"Of course. Do come in."
Setting her displeasure aside for the moment, Siena let them into the room.
The mysterious document had already been dispatched to the Imperial Capital before dawn. The security was so tight that reaching her aides, who had remained outside Gaverum, had been a trial — but in the end, a channel had opened.
It was sent to the capital now, which meant the estate would receive it and keep it under guard.
So right now, Siena had nothing on her person. She didn't know what they'd come here to verify, but she only had to play along with this investigation as if she had nothing to hide, and give them suitably accommodating answers.
Standing at the center of the room, Siena tracked the two men's movements.
"You didn't see the arrow itself, then?"
"Well, everything was such chaos that day, I only heard the window shatter."
The inspector nodded along, scribbling something in his notebook. Scribbling what, exactly? She'd told Claude all of this yesterday.
In the meantime, the administrative officer had been shuffling along the wall, and now came to a stop at one spot.
"This looks like where the arrowhead struck. You truly didn't see it?"
The tactless officer ran his fingers over the place where the arrow had lodged. His hands handled the gouged mark in the wood without a shred of hesitation.
"When alarms are blaring out of nowhere and the glass is shattering, there isn't exactly time to worry about things like that."
Siena tilted her head, meeting the suspicious look the inspector was giving her.
He seemed to be weighing whether the attack had been staged, or whether she was truly nothing more than a victim.
"Is whether I saw the arrow that attacked me really what matters right now? I was simply attacked while taking a rest. I find it rather bewildering."
And then it came.
"Is that any way to conduct an investigation?"
A familiar voice cut in from the open doorway.
"C-Chief Inspector!"
"Good day, sir!"
The two men bent double at the waist in unison, greeting Claude Marcel, who had appeared without warning.
He entered the room at an unhurried pace. When their eyes met, Siena gave him a light nod of acknowledgment, but Claude, looking dissatisfied with something, simply stared at her before speaking.
"Do be careful. There's no spare room, so you're staying in one where an incident occurred, as it stands."
At those words, the two men who had been standing close against the wardrobe flinched and stumbled three steps backward.
He walked toward her, then turned and strode past them both to the wardrobe. He swept his eyes once over the gouged mark, then held out his hand toward the inspector.
"Show me what you've recorded."
The inspector, who had handed over his notebook almost reflexively, felt an inexplicable wave of unease. Perhaps it was the silence, but the sound of pages turning seemed to ring out louder than it should.
"...The initial on-site verification was completed yesterday, and the arrow was collected as evidence. Entry trajectory, fragment dispersal — all recorded, nothing missing."
"Yes, but about the arrow shaft, there's—"
Thud. The notebook snapped shut with a report that filled the room.
"The arrow shaft? If something seems suspect, then all you need to do is examine the evidence."
"That is... orders from above, sir......"
"What is the military's assessment of the possibility of an external threat?"
"Ah, well, that is......"
The dry voice sharpened its edge as though it had been waiting for exactly this.
"The identity of the threat has yet to be confirmed, and yet you carried on rather carelessly. Wouldn't you say your visit here has exposed the victim's location just as she was?"
"My apologies, sir."
"And our administrative officer — what does he intend to do about the Founding Festival follow-up measures that were canceled?"
"I, um, that is......"
Pushed to the far edge of their attention, Siena blinked slowly and observed the three of them.
Picked off one by one and dressed down, the two men couldn't produce a single competent answer. His questions showed no sign of stopping, question after question chaining together without pause, and their direction drifted naturally toward the Chante Kingdom.
How did they read the party behind the provocation? How did they intend to cover the economic losses from the festival's cancellation? What was the current state of trade with the Chante Kingdom?
Somehow, an investigation that had begun by asking where the arrow had flown in from had shifted, before anyone noticed, into asking what the Chante Kingdom was after.
"I'll compile the report and bring it in myself. You two are free to return."
At that, the inspector and the administrative officer packed up their things in haste, relief plain on their faces.
A brief farewell, and the two men hurried out of the room — leaving only Siena and Claude behind.
"Hold on."
She caught him just as he was about to leave. When he turned to face her, displeasure was etched deep into his expression. Siena faltered for an instant, but she refused to be cowed by it and spoke calmly.
"What is this, all of a sudden? Where was all this when you were telling me to cooperate quietly with the investigation?"
"There was no need to overlook such rudeness."
"What?"
Siena watched his gaze drift downward, and lowered her head. Where his eyes had landed, a faint black footprint was pressed into the floor.
She lifted her head again, brow furrowing.
"What is that supposed to mean? I cooperated, exactly like you said."
He didn't answer right away. He simply looked at her in silence for a long moment.
"I intend to stay at the margrave's residence for about two days."
She could only stare at him, wondering what he wanted her to do with that — and then he said something even more absurd.
"This room needs cleaning. Stay in my room today. I'm scheduled to return the day after tomorrow, so make yourself comfortable."
Siena froze on the spot. It took her more than ten seconds simply to string the incomprehensible, outrageous words together and parse them again.
"...You. What on earth are you——"
"I'll have a maid come up in ten minutes. Pack whatever you need."
"What? Hey! Hey, Cl! Cl——"
Siena stared blankly at the door as it clicked shut.
Claude Marcel, it seemed, had lost his mind.