Chapter 120

Checking on the estate at Katelburg and looking in on the long-neglected Bertholdt domain had been Harold's main purposes.

Of course, he couldn't just leave someone who was leaking information running loose. It was good he'd been able to handle it when the chance came. That some venting had gotten mixed into the process was true too, but the man was still alive, wasn't he?

Just keep them alive and things generally worked out. He'd done as he was told, so someone else could deal with the headache side of it. The bothersome coachman had been collected by Leo, or Rena.

As for what would be done with that coachman...

Harold shrugged.

Leave that kind of work to people who were good at it. If there was anything Harold needed to know, they'd tell him. Same if a problem came up. Until then, he just had to do his own job well.

Right. Harold still had things to do. He only had two more days he could stay in the Bertholdt domain.

"Master!"

Harold went back to the old Bertholdt manor. Diane, with no idea about the business with the coachman, was startled to see Harold coming back on a single borrowed horse, and hurried over to him.

In the meantime, the old manor had grown fairly noisy. Twenty staff worked at the manor. Not all of them had gathered yet, and more than half were older, like Diane.

"I thought you had business in the city, Master?"

"I did, but it seems I don't need to go."

Even so, most of the staff must have been at the manor or nearby — the moment Harold arrived, people started drifting in to get a look at him.

Familiar faces, and a few he didn't know. Among them was the young man who had come up to the capital with the news about Günter.

"Someone take the horse to the stable. Master, have you eaten?"

"Mm. I'm fine."

"Your room is just as it was before."

Having worked for the Bertholdts so long, Diane had picked up that something wasn't right. Fair enough — an acting lord who'd shown up without warning and asked to have all the staff gathered wasn't doing it to say a few kind words.

But Harold didn't explain, and asked something else instead.

"If there's anything you need..."

"Diane."

"Yes?"

"Where's Günter's grave? I brought it up with Mattheus already, but I couldn't very well ask Leona."

Diane smiled ruefully.

"Thanks to your kindness, Master, he's resting in the Bertholdt family cemetery."

Behind the old manor, on a low rise, stood the Bertholdt family chapel. It was where the Bertholdts were buried. If Albrecht hadn't been interred in the national cemetery, he'd have been here too.

After parting from Diane, Harold went inside the old manor.

"Hello, Master!"

"It's been a while."

"How have you been keeping, Master?"

Seeing that Harold had arrived, they'd come all the way down to the first floor to greet him. Old but well kept, unshowy but sufficiently old-fashioned, the manor had a warmth the capital house had never given him.

Harold thought of his nephews. They'd stood there at Arnmolt station waving him off, very grown-up about it. He'd been out on business and come back late at night now and then, but being fully apart from them like this was the first time since winter. How many days had it been already? It hadn't been a week since he'd left Arnmolt, and it felt like a month.

He hoped they weren't crying because he was gone. Edgar still woke up sometimes before dawn looking for him.

Even Edwin, who acted so grown-up at Edgar's side, was still no different from a baby to Harold's eyes. This was the boy who'd get so excited just being spun around by the arms that he'd bounce on the spot.

Someday, when the boys' minds were at ease, he wanted to show them the domain properly. He remembered the last time Edgar and Edwin had been on the domain was four years ago. Four years, out of eight years of life! He doubted they had any real memory of the place.

Even if it couldn't be home to them, it could still be a place that mattered. It had been for Harold. He could show them the places Albrecht and Cecilia had loved. There was the kitchen garden Harold used to get into mischief in as a child.

Thinking of his nephews, Harold caught himself smiling.

"..."

But the smile didn't last long. Harold stopped inside the old manor, in front of the door to the room his brother had used as a study.

Clunk.

The door was locked. Harold pulled a key from his pocket and undid the lock.

---

"Your older brother — is he all right?"

"Edgar?"

Edwin blinked.

"Edgar isn't my older brother."

"Then you're the older brother?"

"Mm, that's not right either."

"Even for twins, one of you had to be born first!"

Adelheid kept poking Edwin's cheek.

Edwin batted her hand away in annoyance, but apparently even that was fun — Adelheid kept coming back at him, cackling.

Were real children really this exhausting a species?

To be fair, Edwin was hardly a real eight-year-old, and everyone around him would have found him worryingly grown-up if not for that. Being Albrecht's son continued to work wonderfully as cover.

"Don't know. Mom said Edgar and I got so tangled up playing together as babies that even she and Dad couldn't tell us apart anymore."

"Really? You looked the same when you were little too?"

"They said it was even worse back then."

"Wow."

Adelheid's face shifted from one thing to the next in a moment.

Most of the time she was beaming, but when Claudia wouldn't let her ride, she'd sulk, or run to her grandfather the Marquis Reichnek and put on a show of crying. Sitting beside her grandmother singing and eating sweets, she showed a prim, well-mannered side that suited a girl from a great house.

"I still can't tell you apart!"

"You spot me right away."

"That's because you're the louder one? Edgar's still shy and quiet."

Case in point. As though her laughter of a moment ago had never happened, Adelheid furrowed her brow and said worriedly:

"And he's got a cold, he's just been lying there. Mom said not to bother him while he was resting, so I couldn't even go see him."

"Sleeping helps you get better faster."

"Grandpa said the exact same thing!"

For whatever reason he couldn't figure out, Adelheid burst into laughter as if she'd just heard the funniest joke in the world.

She was a child incapable of being still for a moment. Exhausting, but he couldn't say his heart didn't go out to her either.

Edwin had figured out long ago that Edgar hadn't wanted to come to the Reichnek domain. It wasn't the Reichnek domain itself — it was Adelheid. Before the regression, Adelheid had died young of illness. Edwin had never met a healthy Adelheid either, and finding her here had come as a shock.

A child this full of life, dying like that — no wonder Grisha had asked what he had at the end. Edwin would have done the same. On this side, he'd turned back time itself to save his twin.

Asking for a sister who'd been poisoned to be saved was, if anything, a modest request. Poor Grisha. It had been an assassination attempt aimed at him. Just like his own father. Waldemar's younger brother had also died in an assassination attempt aimed at his older brother.

"Anyway! Is Edgar really okay? He didn't seem to feel good then."

"That's just because Uncle went up to the capital."

"But still... maybe we should've just gone straight home. Is it because I made us go to the beach?"

Edwin looked at Adelheid with an odd expression. So she'd been kicking up a fuss on purpose because she felt guilty. Edgar had been in bad shape the whole way back to the Reichnek manor, and had run a fever the moment they arrived and gone straight to bed.

However fragile Edgar had become, sitting for an hour on warm sand wasn't going to give him a cold. Edwin quietly apologized to Adelheid. What Edgar had wasn't so much a cold as an intellectual fever.

Edwin was the cause. It had been a shock. Even leaving out the parts about the world ending or being ended, he'd told him as briefly as he could.

You couldn't just drop something like that on a child whose memory and mind were unstable.

"I got scolded by Mom too..."

"No, no. It's because Uncle isn't here. And it was hot that day."

Adelheid looked so crestfallen that this time Edwin was the one poking her.

As wide as her range of feeling ran, seeing her wilt like this made whoever was next to her fidgety. Given her older brother's personality, he couldn't imagine where a girl like this had come from. A Lambert family trait? Every time Adelheid got up to something, Claudia would mutter that she was the spitting image of her own father...

"Edgar used to get sick whenever the seasons changed."

"Oh! My brother's like that too."

"He's got a weak constitution."

"Uncle said the same thing."

"Uncle?"

That didn't sound like Harold, so Edwin asked again — and Adelheid nodded emphatically.

"Yeah. Uncle Wilhelm. He works in the capital. Um, he's captain of the royal guard."

"Ah."

That Wilhelm.

Every now and then a name he recognized would come up, and it felt strange. He'd never met Wilhelm Lambert last time around either. He might have crossed paths with him a few times while staying at the Lambert estate, but... not any conversation Edwin would remember.

"He said good health is the best thing there is."

"...True enough. Being sick is the worst hardship."

"Ahaha."

Adelheid burst into laughter for no obvious reason.

"What?"

"Edwin, sometimes you talk like an old man. Just like my grandpa."

"There's a reason grown-ups say what they say. You remember that too."

"See, saying things like that."

Adelheid said it, beaming.

Nothing to argue with, and nothing wrong with it, so Edwin just smiled back at her. She hadn't been trying to tease — Adelheid looked satisfied and went quiet without any sign of disappointment.

Full of energy, sure, but not a bad kid. She'd have picked up that Edwin was worried about Edgar even without him saying so. That was why she kept coming over to talk to him.

Edwin had gotten as much information as he could out of Grisha in the royal palace. But not even Grisha had known exactly what happened during this stretch. Too much had gone on. Even if Grisha had known, with things this changed, there wouldn't have been much left that was still useful.

He didn't know how the business with Adelheid's poisoning would turn out. Too much had already shifted just from not going down to the domain. He didn't regret keeping Uncle in the capital, but...

...Uncle was closer to Grisha than Edwin had guessed. Well, no — he'd never doubted the two were friends, Grisha had said so — but he hadn't imagined that just staying in the capital would drag Uncle into the succession fight. Edgar, who had switched off from central politics entirely, seemed to have missed it, but not Edwin. When Uncle had pinned the northern snowflake to his coat, Edwin's eyes had nearly popped out of his head.

Is Uncle's political influence bigger than I knew?

He wasn't Albrecht — he'd lived his whole life as a knight.

The more he learned about the man, the stranger he got.

"I'll go check on Edgar."

They'd been sitting side by side on the stairs when Edwin came back to himself and stood up.

"He took his medicine earlier so he's probably sleeping, though..."

"Is he still running a fever?"

"No. He hasn't since the first day. But he keeps sleeping!"

"Let Edgar rest. Don't pester him!"

"I won't!"

Edwin stuck his tongue out at Adelheid and darted off toward the room.

It was about time he and Edgar picked up the conversation again.