Chapter 119

The estate was in Second Prince Gerald's name, but the one who had actually bought it was First Prince Carlisle.

If it had just been for use as a country house, there'd have been no need to borrow his younger brother's name. He could have bought somewhere nicer, and in fact the prince did have a country house he actually enjoyed visiting.

Even taking Carlisle's taste for the luxurious into account, the modest estate in Katelburg wasn't the kind of place the prince would use as a country house.

Not that there was any actual sign Carlisle had visited the place himself. But that didn't mean Carlisle wasn't using it. It occasionally served as a hideout for the "friends" Carlisle kept company with — the way Adrien Renard was using it now.

Like most country estates, the prince's was set apart from the village. The only things around were orchards. There were servants living on the estate, but they didn't often leave it. Every three or four days, the grocers in the city delivered whatever they needed.

Ordinary. Unsettlingly ordinary.

Harold looked at the orchard on the low hill. Grape vines. The Intelligence agent stationed in Katelburg hadn't brought up grapes for nothing.

Harold examined the estate carefully. First Prince or Second Prince, for a prince's country house, the security wasn't tight. There weren't even any proper guards. No one was watching the entrance. However shabby the estate, it was still owned by a prince, wasn't it?

But for all Harold's puzzlement, the estate stayed quiet. Only one servant, still up late, walked past scratching his belly.

Harold looked at the estate again. However hard he stared, however carefully he checked for anything he might have missed, nothing changed. It was too... too empty.

Which was what made him wonder if it wasn't actually a trap. They'd gone to all that trouble bringing Adrien Renard here, only to leave him this loosely guarded?

Or had Adrien Renard already left the estate?

Harold had only started moving after the sun was fully down, so he hadn't seen Adrien Renard himself. But Rena had said she'd confirmed Adrien Renard's presence just that afternoon. He didn't think that woman had lied.

After checking the latch on the front gate, the servant swung his lantern about as he headed inside. The nights were starting to warm up. Through the wide-open window, he could see the servant moving from room to room.

Soon the servant went into a room. The light in the servant's room went out. Apart from the faint lights hung on the outer wall, the estate sank into darkness and silence. No light. No one awake.

Harold waited. He didn't think he was the only one looking to exploit the cover of night.

But still nothing changed. No room lit up; no one moved in the dark. Even the chickens they kept in a corner of the yard were fast asleep.

"..."

He couldn't wait any longer.

Harold could only stay in Katelburg until just before dawn. Trap or not, if things went sideways, he was confident he could get himself out unhurt. No witnesses meant a perfect crime. If any cleanup was needed, Grisha would handle it.

Harold slipped quietly through the trees and was up on the estate wall in an instant. The roof tiles knocked against each other with a rough sound, but when his foot came down again, there was no sound at all.

Harold dropped down inside the estate. No full moon — the moonlight was thin. Even so, he slipped inside the building in the blink of an eye.

There was one reason the great Sir Harold Bertholdt was going over walls like a common thief.

Kidnap Adrien Renard? Murder him?

He had both the ability and the inclination for that, but what he was really here for was the "evidence" the First Prince might have hidden away in this country estate. Physical proof of communications with the Kunakshe, or Barun — nothing better.

He'd hidden his identity deliberately to make it this far.

Intelligence could only watch from the outside. Loose as the security was, the prince's estate at least kept outsiders out. The people who worked in and out of the main house were all from the capital. That was probably the bare minimum of security.

For the Intelligence agents watching the prince's estate from Katelburg, exploiting that opening was more than they could manage. Even when they occasionally made it as far as the storehouse under the pretext of a fruit delivery, they couldn't approach the main house. That was why Harold had come.

Of everyone Grisha knew, he could get into the estate and back out the cleanest.

Handling it himself sat easier with him than entrusting it to someone else, so when Grisha had suggested it, he'd accepted on the spot. Harold had asked for only one thing. The blueprints.

Well — no guarantee the building hadn't been renovated, but that beat having nothing.

"..."

Harold tilted his head.

Sure enough, everything was ordinary. No signs the building had been renovated. He kept his guard up in case someone burst out of a room, but from the servants' rooms all he heard was snoring. Harold checked each room just in case, but he was steadily running out of steam.

Was it possible... Intelligence had gotten it wrong?

Was this not the prince's estate at all? Or had they caught on early and wiped away the traces?

Carlisle wasn't the sort to be that meticulous... though who knew.

Harold combed through the prince's estate until time was almost out. Just before sunrise, a servant starting an early day yawned and came out into the corridor. The rooster started crowing. Even by then, Harold was still searching the estate.

The one place that might qualify as suspicious was a lavishly furnished sitting room deep in the main house. The prince's rakish friends had probably done their gambling in here. Even so, it looked like the room hadn't been used in a while — dust had settled. The estate's servants weren't a hardworking lot.

Of course Harold checked that room carefully too. But all he found under the carpet were some coins probably left over from gambling and a single check.

In the end, Harold had no choice but to leave the estate empty-handed before full daylight came.

"Mr. Adrien! Mr. Adrien!"

About to go back over the wall the same way he'd come in, Harold reflexively slipped up a tree in the yard instead.

"Here — take this. Don't forget to feed the chickens, and a delivery from the orchard's coming later! Take it in and put it in the kitchen."

"Ah, understood."

"You've got to do at least this much. It's not like we can wait on you, Mr. Adrien — right?"

"Yes..."

"Still, since there's no lord actually living here, our estate's an easy one!"

"..."

A shaggy red-haired man, cornered by the maid, nodded along. His clothes were much cleaner than when Harold had run into him at the gambling house, but the hunched shoulders and shaking hands didn't suggest he was having a great time.

At any rate, for someone who'd once been the butler of a noble house in the capital, it was a sorry sight.

"A- a- achoo!"

"Oh, dear. A summer cold too, now?"

"N-no, it's just the dust..."

"That's enough — get to work!"

Adrien Renard, broom in hand, staggered toward the chicken coop.

Harold watched the red-haired man fumble through cleaning the coop for a moment, then slipped out of the estate.

---

The present.

A carriage stopped in front of a farmhouse. The abandoned farmhouse, standing alone in a wide field, was one of the buildings the shepherds used as a rest stop.

The shepherd roasting a few potatoes at a bonfire in the yard must have come there for a break too.

The coachman, hat pulled down low, saw the shepherd and nodded. The shepherd, who'd been staring blankly at the fire, sharpened in an instant.

"Good work."

"Still going by Rena?"

"Leo."

The shepherd grinned.

Not a trace remained of the farm woman he'd seen in Katelburg the day before. From every angle he looked like a man. Harold didn't know what trick had been used, but even a shadow of stubble had been worked in.

Harold was impressed, but there was no time to waste on chatter. Harold opened the carriage. On the floor lay the unconscious man.

Leo narrowed his eyes at the bound man.

"He alive?"

"Alive. Here's the weapon I took off him. Is this something Intelligence issues?"

"It is, but..."

A dagger thin enough to hide up a sleeve. Not a kitchen knife or anything filed down from one — a proper blade.

"We're Intelligence. We don't do assassinations."

"Really?"

"The previous Director sorted that out the moment he took office, saying, 'How long has it been since the war ended, and this is still where we are?'"

Leo shrugged.

"It was before my time... but according to someone who was actually there, he was pretty furious."

"That man got angry? Must have been an absolute disaster."

Harold nudged the man's foot back inside where it had been sticking out of the carriage.

"So how far do you support your field agents?"

"Support meaning?"

"Dressing up the way you did, or carriages, horses, that sort of thing."

"Standard is reimbursement afterward. When we're dispatched from the capital, we tend to get an operational allowance, and where there's a regional office, we can get extra support."

"..."

"Something wrong?"

Harold, having asked the question himself, looked at Leo with an unsettled face.

"Even so, I'm an outsider — is it all right to tell me that much?"

"Ah. You ought to know how things run, shouldn't you?"

"Me?"

"You're the next Director."

"...Me?"

"Well, or not."

Slipping it in with that offhand tone didn't take back what he'd said. Harold frowned. Intelligence? Intelligence? Pushing back on a field agent wasn't going to get him anywhere, so Harold shook his head to clear the thought.

Probably Grisha's doing. The current Director of Intelligence was Grisha, after all.

And if everything worked out, the Director's post would be vacant, and Intelligence — which Albrecht had labored to build up — couldn't just be handed off to any random person. Someone who could be trusted, then. Hmm. Right.

Harold scratched his head and said,

"Anyway, were these horses provided from your side too?"

"Horses?"

Properly trained warhorses were expensive.

Intelligence or not, it seemed unlikely they'd hand out warhorses to pull carriages in some country domain. In fact, it seemed unlikely Intelligence had the authority to hand out trained horses at all.

"These are warhorses."

"Warhorses?"

Whit.

Harold whistled briefly. Hearing the whistle, the horses stopped their snorting and settled in place. Harold stroked the horse and looked at Leo.

"No... no. How would central even provide something like horses? Bringing them out here is already a problem, and warhorses all the more so."

"That's why I asked."

Leo looked at the mud-covered coachman. Wrists and ankles both firmly bound. Judging by the swollen face, he'd stay out for a good while.

"...Intelligence has been working on rooting out internal spies, though."

That those "internal spies" meant the prince's own faction was an amusing contradiction. Harold didn't point it out, and neither did Leo.

Either way, warhorses being used for something like this was a serious matter.

"The only place that could provide horses is the household guard."

The horse seemed to have taken to Harold — it rubbed its snout against his hand and snorted.