The Hero of the North Returns

To summarize the situation I now found myself in:

"From a neutral third party's standpoint... I'd have to call it absolutely riveting."

I glared at Noah, dumbfounded.

"Because I am really not in the mood for jokes right now, you know."

"Neither am I. Honestly, try looking at it as somebody else's affair. Isn't it fun? The legendary couple who once had the whole city betting on whether they'd elope—now, ten years later, they're glaring each other down, each with a brand-new lover on their arm!"

"...You haven't gone and opened another betting pool, have you?"

I asked with a weight of foreboding, and Noah's gaze slid slyly aside. That alone was answer enough.

This godforsaken high society, as incapable as ever of breaking its old habits, had transformed itself into one colossal gambling den all over again.

"Hey!"

"I've placed my wager on your side, my lady."

"I asked what the wager was! The wager!"

"Which of the two comes to regret it first."

"..."

So betting on my side meant betting that I would be the first to regret letting Rihard go.

Our eyes met, and looking for all the world as though that were the correct answer, Noah beamed a saintly smile and bolted.

"Noah Belois, you stand right there!"

Running him down, I ground my teeth—remembering the day this entire mess began.

To tell it properly, the story has to go back a few months—to the sudden death of the Duke of Belois.

The instant word of my father's death reached me, the feeling that settled over me was emptiness. Not grief, but the hollow futility of a tower long in the building collapsing at a stroke.

"Ha. Just a little longer and we'd have seen it through to the end. What will you do now, my lady?"

Even in Noah as he asked, there was not a flicker of sorrow for the head of the house who had died mere hours before.

I was no different. There had never been any love between us, father and daughter, and all he'd left behind was sin and filth—what was there to mourn?

"First things first, we defend the title."

"Shouldn't we at least investigate? It's not as though he suffered from any chronic illness. The Crown Prince may have caught on and made his move."

"They're calling it acute heart failure."

"And the fingertips, blackened and withered?"

Honestly, why did he have to be like this? He of all people should have known better.

"Noah. Even if Father was murdered, he died of heart failure."

Only then did Noah stop short, understanding dawning across his face.

"Hm, fair point. If it were exposed as murder, the ledgers might well come dragging out after it, one by one."

"Exactly. Father died of acute heart failure. The blackened fingertips were a side effect of the drugs he was already taking. And as for Damon..."

I let the sentence trail off and picked up today's issue of the gossip sheet TroubleLove from the side table.

Its full name, rendered in flamboyant flourishes of script: [Trouble-Troubled Love]. But to everyone it was simply "TroubleLove"—the most notorious gossip rag in the empire.

True to its name, TroubleLove had seen every scandal and calamity connected to love pass across its pages, and the name appearing there nearly every single day belonged to Damon Philliard, the man hailed as the empire's Next Sun.

Holding up that slick, glossy face hogging today's front page for Noah to see, I said,

"If a man who knows Father has been skimming his privy purse can strut around like this, then he has no business being Crown Prince. He should be an actor."

What followed was paragraph upon paragraph of solicitude and worry on my behalf. Worry, my foot. They were gleefully chewing over what would become of me if Damon cast me aside, all under the guise of concern.

Anyone reading this would think I was the one clinging to Damon, begging him not to throw me away.

Noah nodded along in agreement.

"There's no way philandering on this scale is an act. Honestly, I can't fathom why he trades in his courtesan the moment a new one appears. If a man must two-time, he should at least stay with one of them properly. What is he, a migratory bird?"

"I suppose it's a hobby."

"And the man with that filthy hobby is your lover, my lady?"

The very shape of that relationship made my skin crawl.

"Don't say things like that, even in jest. He and I are bound by contract. Mutual necessity, nothing more."

"Everyone else is firmly convinced the two of you will marry in the end. Tell me—how does it change anything, you being the only one who insists otherwise?"

"My feelings. My heart. All of it, in short!"

"Yes, yes. Contract or lovers, if you'd rather not be misunderstood a moment longer, I respectfully advise you to end things soon. If filth must be flung about, let them confine it to the imperial family. Smeared onto Belois as well, my grievances are beyond numbering."

Anyone overhearing him would think he was the one dating Damon.

"In any case, there's no way Damon knows his own privy purse is springing leaks. He's not that sharp."

"That much is true. Whichever way it goes, this has become a headache. Ten years of painstaking work, and look how it's turned out."

True enough.

Damon wasn't what mattered right now.

"The deed is done, so all that's left is to clean it up. Hurry the funeral preparations. We secure the title first."

"...You're serious, my lady? If you do, the entire matter of the crown funds the late Duke spirited away becomes your responsibility to bear."

"That's a problem for later. The title comes first."

At my words, Noah's face crumpled—as if he'd just heard me ask outright whether I intended to walk into my own ruin. And perhaps he had.

I had started all of this with my own hands, so the ending would be mine to pay as well. I had no lingering attachments. Only a single regret remained—because, like anyone else, there had been one thing I wanted to do once it was all finally over.

There was someone I wanted to go and see.

No matter how far away he was, even if he would never agree to receive me, I wanted to find him and say that I was sorry, that I had never meant a word of it. That I... that I, too...

...loved him.

Those were the words I had meant to say.

Caught up in all this, I might as well have been dreaming a dream that could never come true.

Well, Rih would never know anyway, so it hardly mattered.

With effort, I shook off the last of the feeling. Come to think of it, there was little reason to think that man still remembered me. Better to disappear quietly like this than to go digging up a man who must have forgotten someone like me long ago.

It had been ten years, after all.

"Waaaah! Hurraaay!"

I was still toiling to shake loose the emotions that clung to me like dregs when the view outside the window erupted into commotion.

"What in the world is that noise?"

Startled by a clamor that sounded like hundreds cheering at once, I asked—and Noah began visibly to panic.

"Is now really the time to worry about that? The capital being loud and rowdy is hardly a novelty, is it?"

"...Something about this is off. Be honest with me. What are you hiding right now?"

"Me? From you, my lady? Why ever would I?"

Suspicious, as expected.

I strode across the office in long, deliberate steps. Behind me Noah scrambled in pursuit, squawking in protest, but without so much as a backward glance I flung the window wide open.

And then—

"Extra, extra! The Hero of the North returns with the princess given up for dead! The Hero of the North comes home with the princess!!"

The Hero of the North?

"The Sword of the North! The Shield of the North! Rihard! Rihard!"

Amid the crowd's bellowing came a familiar name. The instant that name—the one I had only ever turned over in the privacy of my own head—hit my ears, I was dragged headlong into a far-off past.

A sun-browned face, smiling with artless warmth. A gaze brimming with affection, a body that was always, always turned toward me. And when the image of that eighteen-year-old boy—who would listen quietly to my every word for an hour, for two—smiled at me, I clenched my teeth and wrenched my head away.

Ah. Just as I thought.

Noah was avoiding my eyes, his face a study in mortification. Which meant he had known. All of it.

"...Noah Belois. When exactly did you find out about this?"

"...The urgent dispatch reached me at dawn this morning."

"So it's really him? Genuinely Rihard?"

"As far as my inquiries confirm. He has apparently made quite a name for himself in the North over the past several years."

I know.

"He held the border against the monsters, they say, until they were calling him the Shield of the North."

I know that too.

"And then a year ago he slew the Monster King and they crowned him the Sword of the North, or some such. How exactly does one man be both a sword and a shield? There are limits to being a contradiction. It's laughable, frankly."

"Presumably he is simply that formidable."

In an instant, Noah's eyes narrowed at the corners.

"...Don't tell me you haven't gotten over him?"

"Me? Over whom? Rihard? Ha! It seems you're the one who's forgotten—I'm the one who dumped him."

I raised my voice all the more, to smother the fluster creeping up on me.

I wasn't the one who'd been dumped. I was the one doing the dumping.

So who can't get over whom?

Noah crossed his arms at that and swept his gaze over me, head to toe. An impudent look.

So. What. What exactly do you hope staring will accomplish? As though it would change the fact that I dumped Rihard?

Outwardly, I had never once been the one groveling in that relationship. As though he'd read my mind, Noah cocked his shoulders back smugly.

"Yes. Well. So you did, my lady."

Then he smirked.

"Though I'm sure I haven't the faintest idea which family's young lady it was who shut herself in her room and wept for three days and nights straight after telling him it was over."

"..."

This was exactly why a cousin should never also be a friend. Shared blood meant he knew every corner of my past, and there was no winning against him.

"In any case, I'll see the death notices circulated before that man makes off with the public's every last ounce of attention."

"Are you two competing?"

Noah heaved a long sigh, wearing the expression of a man who understood nothing, and shook his head.

"Just leave it all to me."

...Leave what to him, exactly?

Noah proved true to his word.

Which is to say, the death notices went out with remarkable speed.

And the result revealed itself in a direction entirely beyond my imagining.

My father had been the dregs of humankind.

A man who had long since hurled his own territory aside like so much refuse, yet clung with mad obsession to the idea of binding our house to the imperial family.

To say nothing of how he persecuted my mother for failing to bear a son—persecuted her, in the end, into taking her own life.

And after all that—after skimming off the imperial family's money and plunging even our own house into peril—he simply turned up dead.

So it was hardly a shock that not one soul grieved his passing.

"Hasn't anyone got anything better to do?"

And yet—why?

From beside the window, I looked out with a face already sick of it all.

"Or... did they all get it into their heads that a banquet was being held today...?"

Why, in heaven's name, had mourners come calling—even from houses to which we had never sent a single death notice?