The Uninvited Guest
The funeral rites of the central nobility are a peculiar thing. When a head of house dies, his body is laid to rest in a cemetery kept in the capital for roughly a hundred years, and only once everyone who mourned his passing has died in turn is he moved to the family lands. It is a custom born of generations of heads of house who spent more of their lives in the capital than on their own soil.
My task today was to scatter soil over my father's coffin before it sank into the deep earth of that cemetery. Put another way, this crowd had come flocking just to watch me toss a single handful of dirt.
"Everyone's here because they're simply dying to know how the young lady—ah, forgive me, how Her Grace the Duchess of Belois—will react to her ex-lover's grand entrance."
Noah, who had been helping with the ceremony at my back, kindly explained the situation to me. The problem was that his kindness was entirely unnecessary.
"Honestly, the nerve. That was ages ago. Why is everyone in such an uproar?"
"No couple has caused a scandal of that magnitude since, so I'm afraid you'll simply have to bear it."
What was this, a relay race? Did we need a baton pass now? I was dumbfounded, but I didn't dignify it with an answer. It wasn't the time, and it wasn't the place.
The grand bell tolling noon began slowly to fade.
It was time.
The moment had come for the new head of house to send off the old.
I walked on the strength of the fragmented view through my dense veil. At some point the noise around me fell away, and I felt every sense I owned narrow to the scene spread before my eyes.
I stopped at the edge of the deep pit. The coffin beneath its blanket of flowers was hidden so completely that not even a corner of it showed.
"What use is a girl beyond becoming empress!"
Perhaps it was because old stories were drifting in from every direction, but the voice that found my ear, of all things, was my father's snarl from ten years ago.
Well, what do you know. The girl you swore would never be anything has become the Duchess of Belois, Father.
I wonder if he's raging furiously down there.
I let out a dry laugh as I gazed at the coffin. I couldn't summon tears even for this last moment—and with so many eyes on me, perhaps I ought to at least pretend to weep...
"Good heavens, he really came."
"They say he passed the capital's checkpoint at dawn... So he came straight here? Leaving Her Highness the Princess behind?"
A murmur. Whispers. And then, just as a strange excitement began to ripple through the crowd, my thought was cut clean off. I froze where I stood.
Rihard. He had come.
Why?
The first thing to fill my head was a question. Why? Why on earth had he come? Did he still resent me? Or had he come to spit on my father's grave?
"Could it be he still isn't over her?"
Just then, someone's whisper bored into my ear.
Not over me. He still, after everything, wasn't over me.
Reflexively, I lifted my head. My body had moved faster than my thoughts.
Ah.
A beat too late, I realized I shouldn't have.
Three days since my father's death. I had slept less than three hours a night, run ragged by the aftermath, and the moment I faced the sun the world lurched before my eyes.
I only understood that I was tipping over after the sky came into view. I couldn't find my balance.
Damn it, Father. Now that it's the last time, did you decide you wanted to see my face after all?
At the bottom of the deep pit lay the coffin, and over it, thousands of flowers. So even if I fell, I wouldn't die.
Probably.
The instant I screwed my eyes shut and ground out a curse in my head, someone seized me roughly. A hot, hard hand caught my arm; another braced my body before it could drop.
As horrified screams erupted on all sides and my body was hauled upward—
"...Rihard."
I murmured his name, and then the world went dark.
"Really. The sheer nerve of it. Do you have any idea how dumbfounded I was when the physician announced that Your Grace was fast asleep?"
The moment I opened my eyes, Noah launched into a lecture.
"Why on earth won't you sleep? I made a point of confirming you'd gone into your room, all the way to the very door!"
"I only meant to look over a few urgent documents in bed for a moment..."
"Hah!"
What was I supposed to do if the bed turned out to be better for concentrating than I'd expected?
When I looked away, Noah clicked his tongue. He declared he would strip the nightstand and the lamp out of my bedroom on the spot, then swallowed a sigh and said:
"So what do you intend to do?"
"About what?"
"The uninvited guest who has taken over the parlor, insisting he won't leave until he's seen with his own two eyes that Your Grace is perfectly well."
"...Don't tell me that guest is Rihard?"
"Who else would shamelessly plant himself in someone else's parlor without so much as an invitation?"
I shot upright in disbelief.
"You should have led with that!"
The first thing I saw was the dark window. How many hours had I slept? No wonder I felt lighter.
"Why didn't you wake me!"
I crossed the bedroom, berating him, and got an exasperated answer.
"Wake someone who collapsed from sheer exhaustion? For a knight who looks like he could swat monsters out of the air with his bare hands?"
"Why do I feel like Rihard's stock just went up?"
Until a few days ago the man had been a son of a bitch; now he was a knight. As I threw on a coat, Noah grumbled at my side.
"I'm giving him credit for saving you. That's all."
Ah. So that was it.
It was a debt of gratitude, true. If I had fallen onto that coffin, the gossip would have trailed me for the rest of my life.
As if there would be only one or two of those ghouls who pretended to worry for House Belois's dignity while savoring every morsel of scandal. And that was before I even counted my uncle Gerard or my aunt Claire.
I shoved the thought of the family elders into a corner of my mind and asked about Rihard.
"So he's still in the parlor?"
"Yes."
"Has he eaten?"
"Must we feed a guest who invited himself into our home?"
Why did he have to turn stingy at exactly that moment?
"You starved him?"
"We set out a light tea service, so if you have the presence of mind to worry about him, worry about yourself. That man could go days without food and be none the worse for it."
Leaving Noah's tongue-clicking behind me, I quickly straightened my clothes and headed straight out of the room.
"Nothing terrible will happen if he waits another hour or two!"
Nothing terrible, he says, after starving a knight for more than half a day!
I hurried down the corridor.
My heart had begun to pound with a strange hope.
Let's look at the objective facts. Rihard had come to a funeral he'd received no notice of. He had saved me, and now he had waited more than half a day in the parlor just to see my face.
No one goes to such lengths merely to pour out resentment.
Which left only one reason.
Still.
If what remained in his heart for me was still there.
Anxiety quickened my steps.
Perhaps we could start over.
By the time my hand closed on the parlor's handle, my heart was beating fast enough to burst. I heard servants spot me and hurry toward me, but my hand on the door was faster.
"Ri—"
"Oh my."
A chandelier casting a soft glow over the parlor, and the warm fire in the hearth.
A beautiful woman reclined comfortably against the deep beige sofa, smiling up at me.
Huh?
Why was a woman I didn't know sitting in the central parlor of the Duchy of Belois?
Unconsciously, I looked her over.
Her pale pink hair hung long in thick, soft waves, and her clothes, worn from long travel, were patched here and there with the leather particular to the North.
"I heard you'd collapsed and I was so worried. Are you all right, Duchess?"
Deep blue eyes curved into crescents. I had never seen this woman before in my life, yet I knew exactly who she was.
How?
Because her eyes were the same color as that damned Damon's.
"Princess... Your Highness?"
"Oh my. You recognized me? 'Your Highness,' really. Forget that stiff title—just call me Sasha. Anyone close with Rihard is a friend of mine, after all!"
"...Ah. Yes."
I answered her radiant smile stiffly.
Your friend is my friend, and so we are all friends. I hadn't thought that way even when I was actually a child.
Behind her guileless brightness—a brightness that had no business in high society—a shadowed figure rose from his seat.
Hair black as ink, dark crimson eyes sunk deep and heavy. A leather cloak draped across his shoulders as though it had drunk in the North's chill itself...
"Rihard Winston."
Face to face with the man who had once been like midsummer sunlight—now unutterably cold, from a past impossibly far away—I murmured his name in a daze.
"So this really is the old friend he hasn't seen in ages. Duchess, there's no need to be so tense. Rihard may look like this, but he's ever so gentle."
Princess Sasha cut in from the side. She clearly believed she was mediating between friends who'd had a falling-out. Then she turned to Rihard and asked:
"Isn't that right, Richt?"
That was my pet name for him.
Mine alone.
I forced down the emotion surging up my throat and looked at Rihard. The Rihard I knew would have warned Sasha, firmly, to keep her distance.
But.
"That's right, Sasha. I'm always kind to you."
The voice that flowed out, soft, was deeper and rougher than the one in my memory.
The frigid gaze that had swept past me melted like spring sunlight the moment it touched Sasha.