The Short Version
The one blessing, I supposed, was that I'd long since grown skilled at playing a woman I wasn't. I straightened my posture.
What Damon demanded of me was clear. Marriage—and no entanglement with Rihard.
Even granting that the first could be settled with time, the second needed handling at once. Given how impatient that man was, even this was already late in coming. After all, he would surely know by now that Rihard was here, right this moment.
Slowly, I opened my mouth.
"That's right. Damon threatened me."
The air in the room turned over in an instant. Tension drew tight along Rihard's jaw.
Meeting those eyes of his, I pressed on.
"My ex turned up out of nowhere, you see, so lately he's been rather prickly. He carried on about how if I ever cheated on him, we'd both end up dead—worked himself into such a state the tears actually came."
I did everything in my power to make the whole affair seem like nothing at all. A lift of the shoulders, both hands raised, a what-can-you-do expression—the very picture of a sweetheart frightened by her lover's past.
"I don't know if you remember, but Damon can be a little... petty."
"So you cried over that?"
"The man you love starts suspecting you—how would tears not come?"
I really was an artist when it came to wrapping things up.
"...What?"
"We were rather conspicuous back in the day, weren't we? No wonder Damon's been so sensitive. Take a look at your own conduct, Rihard. You return as the hero of the North, and the very first thing you do is rescue me at a funeral hall. You have ears—you know what people are saying about us."
That temper of Damon's went far beyond anything such an excuse could explain, granted—but it was plausible enough, apparently, because Rihard couldn't muster a rebuttal. And who knew I'd live to see the day I'd be grateful to that Trouble Lover of a prince.
His lips parted, then pressed shut again. Watching him, I shrugged.
"Still, it'll be all right from now on."
"?"
"Aren't you set to become Sasha's guardian?"
"...?"
A strange expression crossed Rihard's face. He seemed unable to follow me.
Or perhaps he simply hadn't begun to grasp what becoming Sasha's guardian would mean.
Why on earth wouldn't he get it? Even as I wondered, the answer came to me.
He was never the perceptive type when it came to that sort of thing.
Ten years ago, after all, he had gone about glued to the side of that Astar-or-whatever-her-name-was, turning hearts upside down without ever noticing a thing.
A memory I had long forgotten surfaced unbidden, and my lips curled.
"Well, that works out nicely. The hero who saved the princess ends up with the princess. Straight out of a fairy tale—how lovely for you."
"Hold on. Bella, what on earth are you—"
"Your Grace! You must come at once!"
Before Rihard could finish, a knock landed and a desperate shout rang through the door. My brow furrowed.
No matter how urgent it was, surely Rihard's words came first—
"Noah has returned, Your Grace!"
The butler's face, as he said it, was a ruin. Like a wall that had never once crumbled before anything finally giving way, his bewilderment showed plain and unguarded.
"You must come quickly. There's blood—"
The butler, about to say more, caught sight of Rihard and shut his mouth. His frozen face had gone beyond pale into a bloodless gray.
There was nothing more that needed hearing. I shoved back from my seat and stood at once.
"We'll talk again later."
Even amid the uproar swallowing the mansion, Isabella had not forgotten to chase him out. Whether she was wary of the trouble he might cause if left behind, or minded being the one left behind, was hard to say—but Rihard did not care which it was.
He had long since grown used to being pushed to the bottom of Isabella's list of priorities. Pain on this scale could no longer hurt him.
Outside the House of Belois, Rihard murmured quietly, eyes fixed straight ahead.
"Astar."
"I'm back, Commander."
The woman who had been leaning against the wall tugged up the hood pressed low over her face, just enough to flash a crooked grin.
With pale brown hair and brown eyes, she had the sort of face you'd pass a hundred times on any street—were it not for hair matted stiff with dried blood.
Rihard was not startled by her state. The smell of rusted iron had been reaching him from the moment he stepped through the gates.
"Explain."
"Long version, short version? Ah—not insubordination, I swear. It's just that this is a lousy spot for a conversation, so I figured I'd ask."
Rihard's gaze slid to where Astar tipped her head—and there, a short way down an alley, stood a single hired carriage.
A hired carriage, parked among this stretch of grand mansions.
Unhurried, Rihard turned his head.
He started walking, Astar following at a discreet distance, and when her footsteps had drawn near enough, he spoke.
"Short."
"Every last one of the former Duke's informants is dead."
Rihard looked at her, dumbfounded.
"That's too short."
"Well, excuse me—I'd nearly swept them all up when a monster popped out of nowhere, so I grabbed Noah first. Can't have a face that pretty getting scarred, can we? And then that insane monster—maybe it was jealous of Noah's beauty—just had to go and wound him on the face of all places!"
Rihard's brow knotted at the chatter, which had no middle gear whatsoever. Setting aside the monster's appearance itself, not one word of it had been necessary. What business was it of his whether Noah's face was scarred or not? Even so, he did not stop her.
A monster appearing in the Belois duchy, right beside the capital, was reason enough to let her talk.
"By the time I came to my senses, the informants were all dead, the monster was dead, and our Noah was out cold. So I agonized over what to do and hauled him here to the capital. We don't know what state the estate is in yet, so heading there felt risky—and it's not as if the capital is far."
"Any chance you were followed?"
"I'm sharp about exactly that sort of thing, thank you. Relax. Even the driver believes he carted up a few sacks of flour. I bundled him tight as could be, and I did thorough work on the disguise, too."
With that, Astar bared her teeth in a cheeky grin. So that was why her hands had been dusted with flour.
Nothing in Astar's bearing or tone betrayed the least shock at having crossed a monster inside the Belois duchy. It was no performance—such was simply the truth of her.
Watching her, Rihard swallowed a sigh.
Instead of scolding her, he leapt straight to the heart of the matter.
"Its rank?"
"D? No—call it teetering on the ragged bottom edge of D-Rank. Monster in name only: about the size of a rabbit, and its attacks were hopelessly clumsy."
As she spoke, Astar drew a magic stone from inside her coat and held it out. Rihard took it, closed his fist around it with practiced ease, and angled it toward the sunlight.
"A rabbit?"
"Yep. It felt like something straddling the border between beast and monster. Do you suppose monsters are kin to beasts after all? I always assumed the North had no beasts because the monsters ate every last one of them, but now I'm starting to wonder if that's not it."
"Hard to say."
Officially, nothing at all was known about monsters. But roll around in the field with them long enough, and there were things you came to grasp by instinct.
How strong a given monster was, for one.
The North classified its monsters into ranks. The man who had built that ranking system was Rihard himself.
D-Rank corresponded to a cub, if you compared it to beasts. Newly born, and therefore the easiest of all to deal with.
And yet this one had felt like a beast?
"We'll need to learn more."
"Mm. Not unless we turn up another one, I'd say. You know how it goes—when a monster dies, it doesn't leave so much as a corpse behind. It's simply gone."
While Rihard sank into thought, Astar cocked her head toward the mansion, already some way behind them, and asked:
"So, Commander—are you and Bella seeing each other again?"
Rihard had been swiftly putting his tasks in order; his mind snagged and tangled all at once.
"..."
"Hard not to overhear, with all that racket. A love triangle with the Crown Prince, they're saying? How on earth did you end up losing ground?"
"And who, exactly, is losing to whom?"
"You, Commander—to the Crown Prince. I never thought those two suited each other, and now they're lovers? Do you have any idea how shocked I was?"
Rihard regarded her in silence for a moment. Isabella had been with Damon for ten years now. Was Astar only now learning of it?
In moments like these, Rihard felt viscerally how different Astar was from him. In no small ways the two of them were alike: each carried someone they had failed to forget for ten years, and each of those people held Belois Castle. Each could have stayed—and had chosen not to, and left.
And yet here, at the most decisive point, the difference emerged.
Where he ached to know even the smallest, most trivial detail of Isabella, Astar was his exact opposite.
She had severed every thread of news from the capital, resolutely. Complete severance. Perhaps that was why: even a reunion she had long foreseen, Astar received with her whole heart afire—as though it were some chance gift dropped into her hands.