Chapter 76

He didn't know what he'd been thinking.

Whether too many thoughts at once had cancelled each other out, or his brain had simply stopped working, he couldn't tell.

If Grisha hadn't been quick to tell him the boys were safe, there was no telling what he'd have done.

Fortunately, Grisha understood.

"It's fine. Go."

Harold didn't refuse the offer.

Until he'd seen his nephews with his own eyes, he couldn't do anything. Harold forced his breathing steady.

His nephews were safe. The royal guard had spotted the intruder at once and given chase, and Linda had gotten the boys clear.

Nothing to worry about. Or — worry, yes, but no need to be frantic. Harold had built layer upon layer of safeguards around the boys. They'd worked; the boys hadn't even seen the face of the man who'd set off a homemade bomb at the front gate.

By Harold's own design, that man shouldn't even have made it as far as the front of the house. But with the fire at the watch hospital, and the First Prince calling out the royal guard over a supposed break-in at Summerflower Palace on top of it, getting even this far was as much as he could have done.

Damn it — none of this made any sense!

But Harold would think about it later. Too much had happened at once. Working out how it all fit together and what came first could be left to someone better suited to it.

"Woof! Woof, woof!!"

A dog was barking somewhere. A big dog's bark. A sound Harold knew well.

Harold got off the horse almost before it had stopped, close to jumping down.

"Sir Bertholdt!"

"My nephews?"

"This way."

The royal guardsman who'd been on watch at the entrance to the barracks came straight to Harold. The calm tone settled him a little.

Then he heard other sounds. The soft, unbroken voice of an older woman, and a child's voice, sleepy and grumbling.

Harold would know those voices anywhere. Edgar and Edwin. His nephews.

"When's Uncle coming?"

"You can sleep if you're tired, you know."

"But — Uncle..."

"Uncle's really okay, right?"

"I told you, he is. Here, come this way. Linda will move you to the bed."

"I'm not sleeping until Uncle gets here."

They were long past the boys' usual bedtime.

Harold walked toward the voices as if drawn. In the lounge inside the barracks, out of place against the hard lines of the room, two small soft children sat leaning against each other, rubbing sleepy eyes.

One had a blanket, presumably handed over by one of the guards, tucked neatly around him; the other had bunched his up and was sitting on it, apparently finding it too warm. Yawning nonstop, shaking his head at Linda's promises to wake him when his uncle came, stubbornly refusing to budge.

"Edgar. Edwin."

Harold called quietly.

The half-lidded blue eyes flew open. Two identical faces turned toward Harold. Twins or not, they were still hard to tell apart at a glance.

Even Harold hadn't been able to at first.

But now he could. Twins had different personalities, and it showed in the face.

Edwin, quicker to smile, held the corners of his mouth a touch higher than Edgar did. Edgar, who had a habit of pressing his lips together, would tighten around the eyes at the same time.

Very slight differences. Harold still missed them sometimes if he wasn't paying attention. Especially now, when they were running at him with their faces lit up.

"Uncle!!"

The moment Harold dropped to one knee and opened his arms, Edgar and Edwin threw themselves into them with everything they had.

The day he'd first held them in the cold-shrouded room at the Bertholdt estate came back to him. He'd felt the same warmth then.

But the warmth that came at him today was far livelier. Grumbling that they'd been waiting for their uncle, they burrowed in even deeper.

Relieved, Harold held Edgar and Edwin tightly.

---

"They're finally asleep."

Edgar and Edwin gave up their stubbornness the moment they saw Harold's face.

"Who they get that stubbornness from, honestly."

Linda shook her head, but she was smiling contentedly.

"They just would not go down."

Having heard about the trouble Linda had had getting the boys to sleep, Harold couldn't help smiling too. Edgar and Edwin had dropped off in his arms.

The boys, like him, must have felt the tension go out of them the moment they saw their uncle's face. Harold gave an awkward smile with the two of them in his arms.

"This way, Sir Bertholdt. We've set up somewhere for the young masters to rest."

Linda rescued him.

Linda picked up the slipped-off blanket and headed inside. It was the interior of a royal guard barracks — there wasn't anything grand about it. Still, it was enough for the boys to rest in.

When he laid them on the bed, they wriggled together in their sleep and pressed against each other. Whatever happened, these two would lean on each other. Harold was grateful for that.

Of course, best if nothing "happened" in the first place — but nothing in this world went the way you wanted it to. At the very least, neither of them would ever be alone...

"..."

Harold took the blanket from Linda and tucked it over the boys. Cold air was no good for them. Even with a comforter and the blanket on top, it didn't look like enough to him.

He wanted to stay by them all night, but grown-ups had things they had to do. This too was for the boys' sake, so there was no help for it.

Harold forced his reluctant feet to move. Linda would stay, so Edgar and Edwin would be fine.

"Sir Bertholdt."

"Sorry to keep you."

"Not at all. Your timing's good."

The royal guardsman led Harold to the conference room. A meeting was already well underway.

Among the royal guards in the room were faces he'd grown familiar with living in the King's Woods, and a few he'd seen a handful of times back in his academy days. But one man stood out. The row of medals hanging on his chest was one thing, but the red hair moving under the lamplight was the first thing that caught the eye.

As Harold remembered it, the man had to be past fifty, and there wasn't a strand of gray on him.

Feeling the look, the man lifted his head. When their eyes met, Harold snapped his heels together and saluted before he'd thought about it. The man snorted.

"Here? You're starting to look the part of a soldier, Harold."

"...Ah, well. Yes."

Harold gave an awkward smile.

Captain Wilhelm Lambert of the royal guard clapped Harold on the shoulder. As a Lambert and as captain who'd been posted in the capital for years, Wilhelm naturally knew his nephew's friend Harold as well.

"That's enough of that — come here. Have you been briefed on what happened?"

"Not in detail. I heard someone set off a homemade bomb."

But the situation didn't leave much room for the pleasure of a reunion.

At the word bomb, Harold had wondered for a moment whether his hearing had gone from the strain of stopping the carriage. However bold you were, who would think to set off a bomb in the King's Woods? What... what had this person been thinking?

Adrien Renard had pulled his own bold moves in the King's Woods, but even he hadn't set off a bomb.

The scale wasn't large, and the thing was closer to a smoke bomb than a device meant to kill, but a bomb was a bomb. There were injuries.

This wasn't going to end as simple trespass. Whoever it was had known that and gone ahead anyway.

"Did you get them?"

Wilhelm didn't hide his irritation.

"Dead."

"Hm."

"He set off a bomb, remember. On top of the men caught in the blast, two more took serious injuries during the arrest. Be grateful we didn't have a fatality."

"I heard the bomb wasn't especially powerful..."

"Even so, a bomb's a bomb. Nothing life-threatening, though. We have Madam Glaczel to thank for part of that."

"With a bomb, and injuring royal guardsmen seriously, then—"

"Where the hell this one came from, I don't know. Harold, I hear you had one get away too?"

"Trained hand."

The report he'd given the watch must have already made it here. Sure enough, Wilhelm didn't look surprised.

Wilhelm started to answer, then closed his mouth. He looked around briefly and issued an order to the guardsmen.

"Step out for a moment."

Even at the sudden dismissal, the royal guards' expressions didn't shift; they wrapped up neatly and filed out.

Harold stood there awkwardly. But he knew why Wilhelm had cleared the room.

"You think this was aimed at Grisha?"

Harold paused a beat before answering.

"Fifty-fifty."

"Fifty-fifty."

"Dustin Glenn was in a suspicious line of work himself, wasn't he. Meaning someone needed to shut him up, even if it took killing him."

Like the man who'd shown up with a bomb and a stolen royal guard uniform. The thief at Summerflower Palace who'd been the reason for calling out the royal guard, maybe...

They'd happened the same day, but there wasn't a clear link yet. Harold went back over what had happened at the hospital.

Wilhelm would have a better grasp of the whole picture than he did. But only Harold could say what had actually happened inside the hospital.

"The attack on Grisha only came once. And that was probably aimed mainly at pulling my attention away. But the one hiding in Dustin Glenn's sickroom was there for a reason."

"That reason being Grisha."

"What else? Dustin Glenn's interrogation is being run jointly by Intelligence and the watch, and if something happened to him, Grisha would go and check. Guaranteed."

Harold said it flatly.

"Without me there, they'd have pulled it off."

"...That good, were they?"

"They got away from me."

"Mm."

Wilhelm folded his arms and let out a low groan.

"That said."

Harold frowned along with him. Where this kind of hand had come out of, he had no idea.

"The weapons used were... something else."

"Kitchen knife and a paring knife?"

"Whether it was to avoid a trail, or that was all they had, I don't know."

"Killing someone doesn't require anything fancy. At your standard of skill, whoever that was wouldn't have needed a blade at all."

Wilhelm corrected himself.

"Of course, the weapon choice is a clue in itself."

A long sigh followed.

"Not a single thing running the way it should. The royal guard and the watch in an uproar, and only the household guard sitting pretty — it's a farce."

"...A thief at Summerflower Palace, they said?"

"Yes!"

Wilhelm raised his voice.

"Summerflower Palace security is the household guard's job, and I've got no idea why they called me in for the circus!"

That "he'd only just arrived" comment on the way to the conference room had puzzled him — apparently the man had been kept by the First Prince all this time.

Wilhelm glared in the direction of Summerflower Palace and let out a curse.

"He's the one who cut us out of that detail, isn't he? Damn it, why blame us because the household guard can't catch one thief..."

"About that thief."

Harold cut in.

"Was there actually a thief?"

At that, Wilhelm let out a dry laugh.

"The First Prince says so."

"Did he see him, or is something missing?"

"He doesn't know that either."

Harold raised an eyebrow. Seeing Harold's face, Wilhelm gave a mocking laugh.

"I told him we're there to protect the royal family, not to keep him company for petty games, and walked out."

"..."

"What? Three hours he had me there. He should be grateful I only said that much."

Harold looked at Wilhelm.

"Did you actually say that?"

"You don't believe me?"

"No. I'm asking because I think you actually did."

Instead of answering, Wilhelm only laughed.