Tarbec Cream

The Duke lifted the cream from his desk. He opened the lid, sniffed the scent, checked the ingredients, and set it back down.

When he said nothing, Maeve could not help but feel the tension coil tighter. For this, she needed his cooperation without fail.

"…If you still cannot bring yourself to trust me, you may simply stay as you are."

She forced the urgency out of her voice and deliberately took a hard line.

Those blood-dark eyes, as if steeped in gore, and the title of war hero—she had heard the rumors of his cruelty well enough. Because that was what the world knew of him, Maeve had tried, at first, to tread as carefully as she could so as not to offend him.

Yet from everything he had shown her so far, the Duke was not the man who simply swung a sword at every provocation. He was fully capable of cruelty, but he seemed the sort who chose not to take that path unless he had to. The game he had proposed to her in her previous life was proof enough of that.

After turning all of this over carefully in her mind, she had reached a conclusion: it was worth pushing him, just once.

"Then, Your Grace, you will simply continue to dance in the Emperor's palm, and young master Aern will remain forever the pitiful victim caught between the two of you."

Displeasure carved itself sharply across his face. The words had struck his pride; of course they had.

To him, Maeve was more than a little suspicious. She was the woman recommended by Count Iron of the Emperor's faction, and from their very first meeting she had made an outrageous proposal. That he did not trust her was only natural.

He had meant to bring her in as a provisional tutor and take his time assessing her. He had not expected her to reappear only a few days later with a scheme like this.

After a long silence, the Duke looked at the resolve written on Maeve's face and seemed to come to a decision.

"The plan?"

Maeve smiled brightly and began to speak.

After explaining the plan at length, Maeve took out her pocket watch and checked the time. It was ten minutes before five in the afternoon.

"Then I will go and give the young master his lesson."

"I trust you will not disappoint me."

Selver's gaze returned once more to the cream resting on his desk.

"Yes. I will do my utmost."

"Hagen. Prepare everything as this woman has said."

Maeve dipped her head to Hagen in a quiet request that he take care of it. He nodded back as if to say, leave it to me.

She offered the Duke a small smile as well, then left the study with a light step.

She walked slowly down the second-floor corridor. The Duke still seemed full of suspicion, but she was confident she could persuade him with results. The real problem now was the young duke—Aern. If she simply asked him, he would refuse without a doubt. She needed another approach.

Aern had been waiting for Maeve with a sullen face. The moment she opened the door and came in looking bright and refreshed, his expression crumpled at once.

He sat at the desk with nothing but his body—no books, no materials—and even that body wore a face that said he wanted nothing to do with the world. Still, the fact that he had shown up for the lesson without being late made Maeve smile at him warmly.

"Not late for the first lesson. Admirable."

"…Are you actually insane?"

Maeve's old-lady manner of speaking only furrowed Aern's brow deeper. She dragged a chair from the corner of his room, set it in front of the desk, and sat down.

"Well then—we haven't much time, so let us proceed quickly. Today we will begin by learning about our Rodenya Empire."

Maeve sketched a map of Rodenya on a sheet of paper and divided it into four. Aern sat with his legs crossed, half-listening, half-not, and bit into a cookie.

"You will already know that the Empire is broadly divided into east, west, south, and north, and that the Cardenas family hails from the northern region, yes?"

"Yeah."

The answer was perfunctory. Even so, the fact that he answered at all suggested he was only pretending not to care. Maeve paid it no mind and continued.

"Then what are the characteristics of the north? I have never been there myself. Everything I know comes from books, so would you explain a little first?"

Aern crunched his cookie and rolled his eyes upward. Even if his time there had been short, he had lived in the north; she meant to draw out whatever he knew and fix his attention on the lesson.

"…It's cold, there are a lot of mountains, and I think I heard there are a lot of mines… I don't know. It was just cold."

Maeve simply nodded. It was true enough. The north did not have many distinctive features beyond what the young duke had just said.

"Correct. Because it is cold and the terrain is rugged, exchange with other regions is difficult. As a result the people tend to be closed off; they trade and marry among themselves, and many take great pride in pure blood."

Aern bit his lip and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, as if trying to remember something.

"The Marchioness of Ferzen you saw last time was likely one of those who hold that pride."

"Ah—right. That woman."

Aern finally seemed to place her and agreed with Maeve's words.

"In any case, the main sources of income—mineral and leather exports, and ice wine—are all shaped by that terrain as well."

For all his crooked posture and air of dislike, the talk of the north he knew seemed to draw him in; Aern scribbled a few lines in his notebook.

"And to survive on such barren land, martial strength is especially important. Northerners are expected to learn the martial arts from childhood, and that is precisely why the northern knight orders are still regarded as the finest."

Maeve thought of the Cardenas family's own order of knights. In the north, the standing of a knight order meant more than mere force of arms. It was a vital measure of how long a house had endured—and how long a history it would go on to write.

The order led by the Duke was renowned even in the north. There was a reason its name had reached all the way to the capital.

"So in the north, the strength of a knight order can also determine a family's prestige."

Aern lifted his hand from the notebook and looked at her. His eyes had gone round; the expression was pure shock.

Maeve was the one who found herself more startled. This was a fairly well-known fact—why was he reacting like that?

"Your own house has one, does it not? A knight order. And His Grace is famous as a war hero."

Aern thought of the knights he had seen the previous year. When he had been led by his mother's hand from the western slums to the Duke's northern residence for the first time, he remembered the knight who had stood at the Duke's side.

The boy seemed to wrestle with something, clenching and unclenching his hands. Maeve blinked and waited for him to speak.

"…I've never learned any of it."

Ah. Damn. Maeve barely managed to suppress the urge to punch her own foolish mouth for everything she had just been saying so earnestly.

That he had never studied swordsmanship was something she had roughly guessed when she handed him a handkerchief before—there had been none of the calluses that marked someone who trained with a blade.

She had meant to use the fact that he had never learned. What she had failed to consider was that it might wound the boy. Maeve answered calmly.

"That is only because you have not been entered into the family register for very long. You will learn soon enough, will you not?"

As if his interest had snuffed out all at once, Aern folded his notebook with a sharp snap, leaned back, and sprawled in the chair in a far more insolent posture than before.

"…What's the point of any of this."

Maeve stared blankly at the boy fidgeting with his fingers, then closed the book she had been holding and pushed it aside.

There was no point in continuing the lesson. Nothing on the page would reach a child already this thoroughly sulking.

"Weren't you going to leave that kind of fretting until after we had learned His Grace's true intentions?"

"This was answer enough. Your words just now made it clear he has no interest in me."

Maeve swallowed a quiet sound. Everything the Duke was doing in the name of Aern's welfare was only feeding the boy's inferiority. When she thought about it, it was truly strange.

Judging only from her conversations with the Duke, it did not seem that he failed to care for Aern. And yet she could not understand why the Duke himself made no move to draw closer—or why he kept trying to give Aern a freedom the boy had never asked for.

It was sooner than she had planned, but Maeve decided she needed to soothe Aern first. Anything else she tried to say now would fall on deaf ears.

She set down in front of Aern's face—where he lay slumped over the desk—a cream identical to the one she had given Selver.

"…What. Cream?"

"Yes. More precisely, Tarbec cream. It is not widely known, but it is one of the specialties of the north."

Aern looked back and forth between her and the cream with an expression that clearly asked what on earth this was about. Maeve smiled softly and spoke.

"Did I not say I would teach you today a way to learn His Grace's true intentions?"

She took the cream in her hand and waved it before his eyes.

"This is that method."

Aern snatched the jar from her and carefully read down the list of ingredients. Maeve lifted the corner of her mouth a little higher, propped her head on one hand, and asked,

"How much do you know about the Tarbec fruit?"