Interlude: And Thus Did They Meet

Ada didn’t want to go back to the royal capital. There was nothing left for her there.

Now that Lord Credias was dead, no one could force her to use her magic anymore. But what was the point of going home? She had no idea what had become of her parents after Llewyne’s descent upon the royal capital.

Her family had been deep in debt, anyway. She’d heard that her parents had requested financial support from Lord Credias multiple times. Relying on them wouldn’t be an option.

Having said that, she couldn’t defect back to the prince’s side. Setting everything else she had done aside, she had slain a member of the nobility. She had killed her fair share of Farzian soldiers, too. Felix, the prince’s knight, had nearly died by her hand as well, though it appeared he’d made it out of their encounter alive.

If she turned herself in, no doubt she would be tossed into a dungeon for her troubles. Worse still, she might be killed for fear of her magic.

She didn’t want to be imprisoned. The thought terrified her. And that fear was what carried her all the way to Sestina.

When she arrived at the castle town, it was in shambles. There were at least 10,000 soldiers quartered there, and the majority of them were foreigners. The men swaggered around the city, looking down their noses at the actual residents. Though the citizens surely wished to speak up about their plight, Lord Sestina had already been assassinated, leaving Llewyne-aligned nobles to rule the land; there was no way they would be granted an audience. The ones who had nowhere to run had no choice but to suffer in silence, their expressions grim.

Strengthening the town’s gloomy impression even further was the single-file line of people, their wrists and waists bound together with rope, being herded along by Llewynian soldiers. The citizens of the town averted their eyes from the spectacle—likely out of fear that the same fate might one day befall them.

The prisoners had been allowed shoes, at the very least, but only ones of the old and worn-out variety. Their bodies were wrapped up in tattered blankets, perhaps a consideration their captors had made in light of the chillier weather. Their hair was so dirty that it was hard to guess when it had last been washed. The majority of the procession were either unshaven men or boys too young to grow a beard.

They were probably slaves dragged in from who knows where. Llewyne still practiced that custom, it seemed.

Considering they were all men, Ada assumed that the plan was to make them into indentured soldiers. That meant Llewyne’s numbers would exceed the last count she’d heard.

Will Kiara be able to win? was the first thought to pass through her mind.

The obstacle the viscount presented had been eliminated. More defective spellcasters still remained, however, and those would need to be dealt with. If Kiara and the prince focused their efforts there, the rest of the battle would come down to your typical contest of numbers.

In most cases, war was a fight of attrition. If the battle devolved into a free-for-all, there was no telling if Felix or the prince would get out unscathed.

“This way, Lady Spellcaster! Hurry!” a knight urged her, and she followed him into Sestina Castle.

The castle was an exercise in elegance. The interior had been devastated and set aflame at some point during the war, but it had more or less been tidied up since.

In a room overlooking the landscape beyond the town limits was Lord Patriciél. Given that he was wearing the same long-sleeved jacket, vest, and Oxford shoes she’d seen him wearing at the royal palace, she assumed he wasn’t going to be heading out to the front anytime soon.

The knight who had escorted Ada there explained what had happened during the Battle of Eirlain. After the count had heard the full report, he gave a soft sigh.

“So that’s the end of Credias? I see,” he muttered. “He always was an unruly one.”

That was all he had to say on the matter.

Ada was puzzled by the lack of reaction. Here she’d expected him to lament the loss of such a valuable asset. Not to mention that he and the viscount had known each other for years now; surely he should have felt something over the man’s passing.

She pondered what he could be thinking, only to snap to attention the moment she heard her own name. “What will you do now, Ada? Wasn’t the reason you let yourself get caught up in this war that you couldn’t come up with a means of escape?”

The question took Ada by surprise. It was almost as if he was telling her she should run away.

“Are you saying I don’t have to fight?” she couldn’t help but ask.

Lord Patriciél snorted. “A spellcaster can’t be forced to wield her magic. Now that we’ve lost our means of keeping you under control, the matter is out of our hands. We couldn’t even hope to use your parents to blackmail you; they’re already dead.”

“They’re... what?”

“I’m sure you suspected as much. They insisted on broadcasting their daughter’s magical talents throughout the Llewynian army in hopes of scraping together some money. It was bound to throw a wrench in our plans at some point, so we disposed of them accordingly.”

And so, it was through a passing remark that Ada finally learned the fate of her parents.

From the sound of it, the count had considered using them as blackmail material. Uninterested in letting them fatten their pockets, however, he had instead ordered them removed for the nuisances they were.

The revelation stirred up little more than dull surprise within Ada. It wasn’t as though she’d never experienced their kindness; she could still recall the days when they’d run themselves ragged to give her a happy life. Those memories, however, had long since become a thing of the past. They had been overwritten by the times her parents had scorned her and said she had no value to them, even as a political tool; the times they had berated her for letting herself be defiled by the viscount; and of course, the time they had informed her that she had been effectively disowned.

After all that, they had tried to get ahead by name-dropping the daughter they had supposedly washed their hands of, it was hard to feel too mournful about their passing. Anyone could see that they had cared more for themselves and their fortune than they ever had about love.

“Nobody is going to come looking for you anymore. If you hide yourself out in the countryside, assuming the prince doesn’t get desperate enough to send a search party after you, you’ll be able to live your life without fear of imprisonment.” Lord Patriciél gave a wave of his hand as if to say, Get going!

Ada was stunned. She had been sure he’d brought her here to tell her the strategy and persuade her to go into battle. She began agonizing over whether or not to fight... and in doing so, realized that she’d wanted to be saved from making her own decision on that for a little while longer.

Still, under normal circumstances, he would have forced her into battle no matter how she begged and pleaded. Llewyne had to contend with Kiara’s power as a spellcaster, as well as those mercenary-tamed monsters. Farzia and Salekhard had joined forces now, too. To make matters even worse, Prince Reginald himself had learned how to wield some form of magic.

No ordinary army could hope to stand against them. Did he have some sort of plan to deal them a hefty blow here, then turn the tables in the next battle?

Regardless, if they lost the Battle of Sestina, their commander-in-chief, Lord Patriciél, was likely to go down with the ship. So why wasn’t he backing down from the fight?

“Do you have some sort of ace up your sleeve?” she blurted out.

“Of a sort. Ah... I see you’re convinced we’re going to lose. I suppose anyone would think that, given the circumstances,” he said with a chuckle. “I don’t need you to understand my reasons. Her Majesty made my dream come true; in exchange, I plan to stay by her side until the bitter end. Surely you, of all people, can appreciate that.”

When she heard that, Ada finally understood: this man didn’t desire anything more than Queen Marianne herself.

◇◇◇

Following that conversation, Ada lingered in Sestina Castle. She borrowed a room there and had the jittery servants tend to her needs.

No matter how hard she thought about the future, she couldn’t come to a decision. After all, she didn’t have the skills to fend for herself.

Daughters of nobility never had the chance to buy things for themselves, so she didn’t know how to handle money. She hadn’t the faintest idea where to begin with renting a house. While Lord Credias had treated her as a servant, she had never run an errand outside the manor, so she had little knowledge of anything but housework.

If she tried turning to the nobility for help, she would be making her whereabouts known. Whenever the prince decided he wanted to try her for her crimes, it would be easy to find her.

Perhaps she was better off waiting around until the battle was over. But if they lost, would she have to go back to the queen? She didn’t want to do that, either.

While she was still debating her course of action, she was offered the opportunity to dine with the count. She took him up on his invitation—though she wasn’t clear exactly why he had offered it.

He asked her, “If you aren’t planning to flee, will you go to the front?”

“Well...”

Ada was almost relieved that he had finally come out and asked her. That said, she had no desire to fight. Just as she was about to request some time to think it over, she suddenly changed her mind and asked a different question entirely. “You plan to fight for Her Majesty, yes?”

Lord Patriciél responded without batting an eyelash. “We first met when she was only thirteen. I was sent to Llewyne as part of a delegation in charge of postwar negotiations. I had to sacrifice my own daughter for the opportunity, but at least I succeeded in gaining the king’s trust.”

“Did you just say ‘your own daughter’?”

“She was made into a spellcaster, just like you. Though based on what I heard, the experiment failed, and she died as a result.”

Ada’s hand slipped in shock, her knife nearly clattering to the table. He’d tried to turn his own daughter into a spellcaster? No matter how cold-hearted she’d thought her own parents, at least they had only tried to use her, rather than sending her to her death.

All of a sudden, she was starting to see the count as a beast in human clothing.

“What, you didn’t know? Here I’d assumed Credias must have told you,” he replied, nonchalantly munching away at his meal. He shoved a forkful of meat into the very mouth that had just confessed to sacrificing his own child.

“A mere generation ago, the royal family despised the House of Patriciél; they confiscated half of our territory and raised our taxes higher than any of the other provinces. Marrying an illegitimate daughter of the royal family was my one and only option to rectify the situation.”

From the sound of it, he’d married for political gain, taking a royal woman who couldn’t come forth about her lineage as his wife.

“We had a daughter together. When I heard that the royal family needed her, given our tenuous standing, I had no choice but to hand her over. As I said earlier, she failed the trial to become a spellcaster, and the royal family covered up their hand in her death. My wife had already passed away by this point, so it was easy enough to keep hidden.”

Considering Ada had been turned into a spellcaster herself, she didn’t find this a particularly pleasant topic.

Lord Patriciél continued his story. “Oh, right, I was supposed to be telling you about Her Majesty. At the time, I hoped to restore my house to its former glory by leveraging my ties to the Llewynian nobility. I went to Llewyne, and that was where I met Queen Marianne.”

Queen Marianne, only thirteen years old at the time, had been doing everything in her power to curry favor with the king. There had been several instances of Llewynian princesses being married off multiple times over to set the stage for an invasion, and many of those unfortunate women ended up murdered in a fit of rage by their husband or his family. As a matter of fact, one of Marianne’s own aunts had died that way.

“I suppose it’s because Llewyne couldn’t survive as a nation without expanding its territory. Climate change is slowly but surely eroding the whole country into desert. The citizens must be rather anxious about the situation themselves; I believe they’ve never lost a war apart from the one with Évrard.”

Marianne had been convinced that she would be the one offered up during these ceasefire negotiations. Her older sister had already been married off to another country, after all.

That had led her to interrogate Lord Patriciél about Évrard’s current state of affairs. “She wanted all the information on her soon-to-be home that she could get. At first, I found it to be quite an inconvenience. Her Majesty must have noticed how reluctant I was to give her the time of day; she offered to trade Llewynian intel for answers to her questions.”

Lord Patriciél accepted her offer, figuring he could use that information to elevate the status of his house even further. After several conversations with her, he began to empathize with this girl who was clearly struggling just as much as he was. Long after the decision was made that she would not be presented as a bride, the two still kept in contact with one another.

When she was finally married off to Farzia after the second war, he won several Farzian lords over to her side. The fruits of his efforts could be seen in the number of nobles who had defected in the ongoing conflict.

Of course, Lord Patriciél did not throw his lot in with Queen Marianne out of pity for a girl so close to his daughter in age. If he had anything resembling a conscience, he would have done whatever it took to protect his own little girl. Moreover, if he was truly that tormented over his daughter’s sacrifice, he never would have considered handing his adoptive child, Kiara, over to the viscount.

The most likely explanation was that he had simply fallen in love with Queen Marianne, little girl that she was. However, the age gap between them had been large enough that he hadn’t wanted to admit it until their reunion sometime after she’d come of age.

He cared enough about the princess of another country to devote his whole life to her, yet—whether she was a product of an undesirable marriage or not—had sacrificed his own daughter, and even now was using countless slaves as his pawns on the battlefield. Though Ada found that dual nature of his somewhat alarming, she couldn’t bring herself to condemn it.

She had acted the same way, after all. To her, Lord Azure had been nothing but a pawn to help her achieve her own desires. No matter how kind he’d been to her, she had always looked down upon the good-hearted and naive marquis, until eventually she’d disposed of him like a piece of trash lying in her path. She had convinced herself that was the only way she could be with the prince... without even realizing how thoroughly those ambitions had twisted her.

What had clued her in to her own shortsightedness were the actions of Felix and Kiara. Unlike Prince Reginald, who never so much as looked her way, Felix had indulged her many whims—even if it was just part of his job—and shared some frank advice with her. When she had nearly killed him, the moment she knew she might never hear his words of guidance again, it had dawned on her that she treasured his approval more than the prince’s.

And then there was Kiara, the girl whom she had tried to blame for everything that went wrong in her life—with the reason being that she’d always looked down upon her. But of course, Ada had likely viewed Kiara as beneath her because she’d seen herself as pathetic from the start.

Ada’s parents had never paid her much mind, and her betrothed wasn’t anyone to write home about. Hearing the rumors of the tormented Kiara and thinking, I’m better off than her was what had kept her going.

After she had been forced into marriage with Lord Credias, she’d found some comfort in telling herself it was all Kiara’s fault for running away; however, when she’d witnessed Kiara’s captivity in Trisphede, she’d realized how naive it was to think that.

If Kiara had been the one to marry Lord Credias, she would have suffered an even worse fate than Ada. No doubt she wouldn’t have been afforded the same “grace period” Ada had. When she saw how hellbent the viscount was on assaulting the apprehended girl, it had dawned on her just how easy she’d had it.

Had talking about Queen Marianne loosened his lips? Whatever the reason, Lord Patriciél took the opportunity to come clean about everything. “If you’re going to run, now is the time. The only reason you caught our attention in the first place was because of your father.”

“What?”

“We needed him to forge some documents for us so that we could get our hands on a contract stone mine.”

Lord Credias had possessed a wealth of contract stones, and considering he held no territory of his own, there was no way he owned any mines. Ada had always assumed Lord Patriciél must have had one to his name, but it seemed she’d guessed wrong.

“The one we found was in the royal domain—in other words, on land that used to belong to the House of Patriciél. If we wanted to secure a mass of contract stones without the royal family’s knowledge, we needed to pull in your father, who managed the province’s official papers. Hence we arranged for you to marry Credias.”

“Wha...”

What a revelation. Ada was struck speechless.

“Your fiancé stood in the way of that goal. It was easy enough to get another woman to seduce him away from you and then offer him the funds to elope. We hadn’t dreamed that you would storm out of the wedding venue, however. Not only did it take a good bit of time to track you down, but Credias gave me quite the fright when he nearly killed you in that little experiment of his.”

The reason Ada’s wedding had gone the way it did—the reason she’d been forced to marry Lord Credias—had all come down to a secret plot to harvest contract stones.

Still dazed, Ada left the banquet hall and headed back to her quarters. She hit the sofa with a thud.

Lord Patriciél had told her she didn’t have to stick around. Her mother and father were both gone now. Furthermore, her entanglement with the viscount had never been Kiara’s fault.

She had even less of an idea of what to do than she had before dinner.

“I don’t want to fight, but...”

Ada chewed on her lip. Wasn’t there anyone who could drag her away from here... who could tell her what to do?

At that moment, something Kiara had once said rose to mind.

My original plan was to live a commoner’s life off in a corner of the town.

If Kiara could pull it off, there was no reason Ada couldn’t. If nothing else, that life would treat her better than a grisly end on the battlefield.

And yet, she couldn’t will herself to get to her feet. The idea of venturing out into the unknown was too terrifying.

It was right then that she heard a knock on the sliding door of the veranda. When she turned to look, her eyes flew open in surprise. On the other side stood a silver-haired girl.