The atmosphere in the dining room was somber. It was the first family meal since the head of the household, Count Whitteger, had suddenly passed away in a carriage accident.

Edna gently raised her eyes and looked around at her family. Despite the sudden death of their father, not a single person was sunk in grief or sorrow. Their father had always been a busy man, and on the rare occasions when Edna woke up early in the morning, she could only catch a distant glimpse of him getting into a carriage and leaving.

Even now, when Edna thought of her father, the only thing she could remember was the back of a tall man with neatly groomed golden hair. He had been a handsome man, but he had never embraced her warmly or spoken to her with affection. Come to think of it, they had never really clashed either, but for that very reason, theirs was a relationship one could say was worse than that of strangers.

“Let’s eat.”

Katrina Whitteger said, picking up her spoon. Katrina, with her black hair elegantly pinned up, was the stepmother who had remarried Count Whitteger just before his death. She was a full fourteen years younger than their father.

Still dressed in black mourning clothes, Katrina looked less like a stepmother and more like an older sister to Edna’s brother Roderick.

Her glossy black hair was elegantly pinned up, and she wore a black lace mourning dress with a high neck that only elderly women would typically wear. Yet her fair, luminous skin and lips the color of freshly picked cherries hinted that she was younger than she appeared.

Even so, Katrina was incomparably more composed and cool-headed than either Edna’s brother or sister. It was Katrina who had calmly managed the household and led Saluga even in the wake of their father’s sudden death, and it was Katrina who had protected her, her sister, and her brother from the pack of relatives and retainers who had descended like jackals after the funeral.

Why had none of this been visible to her in her previous lives? Truly, it seemed people only gained wisdom through tremendous hardship. But then again, she must have suffered in those previous lives too, so this was all the fault of that deity who had put her through endless suffering and then wiped away every memory. That wretched deity!

Edna looked at Katrina for a moment with sympathy, the dark circles under her eyes a testament to her exhaustion. The fact that she felt closer to Katrina, who did not share a single drop of her blood, than to her own father, was probably because she had been watching Katrina work herself to the bone right beside her. Perhaps sensing her gaze, Katrina turned her eyes toward her, and Edna quickly looked away. She could feel Katrina’s gaze fixed on her forehead.

“Ah, I’m hungry.”

Edna smiled brightly, as if she had no idea about Katrina’s gaze, and picked up her spoon. Before her sat a mushroom soup that the cook had prepared with great care since early morning.

Edna quietly lifted her spoon and scooped up some of the mushroom soup. As the rich scent of cream mingled with the aroma of mushrooms drifted to her nose, her mouth began to water.

“How can you even think about eating right now?”

Marian snapped in a sharp voice. By age, she should have been past the phase of raging like a wild black dragon, yet here she was. A lifetime of turbulence, apparently.

Edna glanced at Marian with a troubled expression.

‘Good grief, I haven’t even had a single spoonful yet.’

Edna was hungry. She had woken up at five in the morning, run ten laps around the training grounds, completed her basic drills, and then rushed to wash up and run to the dining room to make it in time for the meal. Quite unlike someone who had just been sitting in front of a mirror doing her hair.

Edna secretly shot a brief glare at her older sister Marian Whitteger and pursed her lips. Regardless, Marian Whitteger continued in her irritable voice.

“Why hasn’t the ship come in yet?”

Good grief! Anyone listening would think she was worried about business. The eldest daughter of the family, fretting over all the various problems that arise when a ship fails to arrive! Just imagining it was moving, wasn’t it? But Edna knew that Marian’s anxiety was not about the ship or the goods it carried.

“Anyone who heard you would think you were worried about Saluga. Just eat your food, Marian.”

Katrina said in a cool tone, picking up her spoon. At that, Marian snapped back in her sharp voice again.

“No, aren’t you worried? It’s already been two weeks past the date it was supposed to arrive.”

Marian’s eyes were clouded with anxiety. Her hands, hidden beneath the table, gripped and twisted her skirt. But Edna knew that Marian was not worried about Saluga’s trading ship.

“It’s not just the ship, but all the people aboard it are precious members of Saluga.”

Marian looked as though she was about to launch into a full speech right in the middle of her meal. If Marian had not been her older sister, if Edna had not known that she perpetually wandered somewhere between mood swings and adolescent temperament, Edna would have been perfectly prepared to be moved. What a shame.

Sure enough, Roderick, the eldest, scooped up some soup with his spoon and said,

“Marian, it’s touching, but I have my doubts about whether that sentiment of yours is sincere. The ship will come in soon. It would come in even sooner if you would just accept the Crown Prince’s proposal.”

The ship was being held at an island off the harbor. The Emperor was refusing to allow the ship to dock, using the excuse that there might be subversives plotting rebellion against the empire mixed in among Saluga’s crew, and that an investigation was necessary.

* * *

Edna looked down at her soup bowl and fell into thought. She had been thinking all along. Where had her fate gone wrong? Why had Saluga, with its thousand-year history, slowly crumbled?

In the heart of the empire’s splendid capital, along the Saint-Germain Street where the most magnificent shops gathered, stood an old building that was the Whitteger family’s trading house, the main branch of Saluga. In truth, Saint-Germain Street itself had been built around Saluga. Considering that the empire’s commerce revolved around Saint-Germain Street, the empire’s economy was essentially centered on Saluga.

Saluga had existed even before the empire was born. The first emperor could not have founded the empire without Saluga’s help. The reason the Whitteger family was merely a count’s house was because the Whittegers had wanted it that way. Every citizen of the empire knew that a dukedom would have been no problem at all if the Whittegers had wished for it.

And yet, that very Whitteger family had been wiped out. Saluga had been reduced to ruins. All because of Edna. In her previous life, and the life before that. As far as Edna could remember, the fall of Saluga and the annihilation of the Whittegers had always been because of Edna. But where had it all gone wrong?

Thinking about it, Edna felt quite wronged. She had been an ordinary young noblewoman who became an ordinary knight. She had clung to the Crown Prince out of love, but who among the living had not done something like that at least once in their life? Wealth, honor, love. Becoming the Crown Princess symbolized all of those things. So why had her every action brought about Saluga’s destruction?

And so Edna made a resolution. In this life, no matter what, she would live differently. Instead of taking up the sword and turning a blind eye to everything around her, she would set the sword aside and open her eyes wide. Wide open, and see clearly. Who had dared to ruin her Saluga, who had killed and erased the Whittegers! She would uncover it all without fail and make them pay the proper price!

“I don’t want to marry the Crown Prince.”

Marian muttered sulkily. She had someone she loved. If it were anyone other than the Crown Prince, he was a decent enough person, and marriage would have been easy. But one day, out of nowhere, the Crown Prince had proposed.

“He must have an ulterior motive.”

That was only natural. Even minor nobles calculated gains and losses before marrying, so there was no way the Crown Prince had proposed without any thought behind it. Marriage is a business. The family’s interests came first. After that, one weighed one’s own stake in the matter.

Love? Love was a matter that could be resolved in any number of ways without necessarily involving marriage. At least, that was what royalty, nobles, and anyone who had read a book or two all thought. It was something of a fashion. It was perfectly normal for a husband to have a mistress or a wife to have a lover. Was that not the very arrangement both parties had agreed upon from the start?

Love? How provincial.

The problem, however, was that the Whitteger household tended to be rather provincial and old-fashioned. Perhaps that was why they had disappeared so easily. Edna looked at Marian. Even though she was always irritable, Marian was a beautiful young woman.

Marian’s blue eyes, so like their father’s, were deeply shadowed. Those blue eyes, almost a symbol of the Whittegers, were the one trait the three siblings shared. Roderick, Marian, and Edna, each born of a different mother, bore little resemblance to one another for that reason. Aside from the deep blue eyes said to be passed down only to the Whittegers of Saluga through the generations, they were all different in appearance and in character.

“Of course he has an ulterior motive. That is precisely why none of us are forcing you to marry him.”

Roderick said in an indifferent tone, cutting his steak and putting a piece in his mouth.

‘Not forcing me, he says!’

Edna shot Roderick a brief sideways glance. Roderick seemed to find this entire situation a nuisance. And no wonder, for he had little interest in the family business or household affairs. As long as he had a decent meal and an enormous quantity of books, he had little interest in anything else in the world. So he probably wanted Marian to simply accept the Crown Prince’s proposal and resolve the situation quickly.

“Marian, that’s enough. Eat your meal.”

Katrina said, her face cold and composed. At a glance, it might have seemed as though she was angry at Marian for whining and complaining, but Edna knew that was not it. Katrina was angry at the Crown Prince. In true provincial Whitteger fashion, she was irritated by the audacity of treating a marriage proposal like a business transaction.

“It will be fine. The ship will return soon.”

Edna said, scraping the last of the sauce from her plate with the remaining piece of meat. Marian cried out in annoyance.

“What would you know! You’re just a child who doesn’t understand anything, so stay quiet! This is serious!”

Edna smiled with an innocent expression and said with a light laugh,

“The other day I went to a dessert shop in town and they had raised the price of coffee. They still charged me the old price, of course, but they said that coffee had been growing scarce all the way from the capital and that they would have to start charging more too.”

“What does that have to do with our ship?”

“Why wouldn’t it? If our ship doesn’t come in soon, the price of coffee might skyrocket. It’s been held out there for two weeks now on some flimsy excuse, and while we’re certainly taking a loss, well, we can simply raise our prices in return. If we just release the tea and coffee we have stored in the warehouses, we’ll be fine for a while. Tell them to rest comfortably out there. And have the newspaper that Saluga runs print that it’s all the Imperial Family’s fault.”

Edna pretended not to notice that everyone was staring at her with wide eyes, and popped the last piece of meat she had wiped clean from her plate into her mouth. A rich, deep burst of savory juices spread through her mouth. It was the kind of taste that naturally brought a satisfied smile to her lips. A taste she wanted to savor for a long, long time!