“Not a lackey. I am a Camelot, Terra.”

“Quiet! What is a Camelot dog doing crawling all the way out here? Hilude is neutral ground, fine, I’ll grant you that! But this area borders Melos and is practically our territory! You’re here to spy on House Ordo, aren’t you, you sly thing?”

“Catching a thief.”

“A thief……?”

Jade had been peering into the wolf’s mouth. He pulled something out and held it up.

Rose recognized it immediately. The brown leather pouch.

The pouch she had filled with Karshi mint candy and handed to him.

The wolf had apparently been holding it in its mouth the whole time. Sticky saliva dripped steadily from the leather.

“Are you an idiot?”

Rose looked at him with undisguised exasperation.

So a wolf monster had stolen Jade’s candy pouch, and Jade had chased after it and gotten into a brawl to get it back. Was there really another fool in the world who would pick a fight with a monster over a bag of candy?

“Pfft, ha ha ha! Serves you right, Camelot! Fighting a beast like a beast yourself, what a sight!”

Terra laughed and pointed, thrilled to have something to hold over him.

“What a waste. Haah……”

Jade let out a mournful sigh as he stuffed the candy pouch, soaked through with monster saliva and thoroughly ruined, back into his jacket pocket.

The look he turned on the unconscious wolf monster, full of grievance and sorrow, was so absurd that Rose felt her jaw go slack.

“You tormented a poor wolf over a bag of candy? The only thing that’s grown in five years is your body, Jade Camelot.”

“It’s not dead. Why is it poor?”

He brushed off his hands and snapped back.

“It’s smaller than you and weaker than you. Imagine how frightened it must have been. Poor thing.”

Rose laid on the sympathy for the monster in an exaggerated show of criticizing Jade.

Why were all the newspaper articles about him nothing but praise and flattery? The man did so many foolish things.

“This isn’t a cute little puppy, Rose. It’s a monster. A big one that can conjure lifelike illusions. The kind that could take on an entire army.”

“Even so, a monster is still a creature, Jade Camelot. And one that’s smaller and weaker than you, at that.”

Saying it out loud made it ring even truer. Jade himself was a monster with a larger body and greater strength than any wolf monster.

“Honestly, what a wretched Camelot! Picking on a helpless monster, what a petty little man! What poor unfortunate woman is going to end up with someone like him! Tsk, tsk!”

“That’s enough, Terra. What fault is it of a woman who isn’t even a Camelot yet to be cursed in advance?”

“I went too far, Miss.”

Jade looked at the two women with a sour expression, then lowered himself back onto one knee. He slid his hands under the collapsed wolf’s body and lifted it up like a baby.

“Why? What are you going to do? You know it’s illegal to kill a monster that isn’t showing aggression, right?”

Rose hurried after him.

“Taking it to the hot spring.”

The moment Jade took a step forward, a low, rumbling growl shook the misty air of the forest.

“……”

All three of them went still at the same time and cut their eyes around.

This time the hostility was unmistakable, spreading through the forest like fire.

Golden eyes began to gleam and emerge from the undergrowth, one by one.

Grrr, beasts with saliva dripping from sharp fangs closed in and surrounded the three of them.

Not all of the wolf pack had been illusions.

Ah, so it really was going to come to bloodshed after all, and that was just too……

“Run.”

Jade said it short and sharp, then spun around and sprinted toward Hilude hot springs.

His speed, carrying a wolf the size of a grown man, was startling. Rose hesitated for just a moment, and in that instant the wolves hiding in the undergrowth burst out snarling and tore off after him.

“……Huh?”

Twelve small, ordinary wolves. No. Twelve monsters so faint in power they were indistinguishable from ordinary wolves, barking furiously as they disappeared into the distance. The two women were left standing alone where they were.

“Um…… what do we do, Miss?”

Terra looked back at the empty path to the west and clicked her tongue.

“Well, it’s sorted itself out. We might as well take a hot spring bath while we wait for Mother to send someone.”

Rose thought about it briefly, then walked into the cloud of dust the wolves had kicked up.

❀❀❀

“Haaaaah.”

Jade let out a long breath that split the hot spring water into two rippling waves.

“Why am I treating a monster?”

His eyes had gone blank with bewilderment. Settled in his usual spot along the edge of the spring, he held a wolf monster the size of a grown woman cradled in both arms.

“Whimper.”

The blue wolf made a rather pitiful sound from inside his embrace. It seemed to find his broad chest quite comfortable. Both front paws were pressed flat against him, and it kept letting out soft groans and whines in its sleep.

The pack of wolves that had followed it here were sprawled flat in the undergrowth outside the spring, dozing. Monster or not, the sacred power surrounding Hilude hot springs seemed to have stripped them of their aggression.

“You beat up a creature over something trivial. Animal abuser.”

Rose made the pointed observation with a prim expression, then produced a piece of candy from her own supply and popped it into her mouth. She savored the gentle sweetness of the fragrant Karshi mint, sucking on it with soft little sounds.

“I didn’t beat it up. I used the minimum force necessary to subdue it and recover stolen property.”

Jade furrowed his brow slightly and protested.

Rose found herself thinking of yesterday’s newspaper article and scowled before she could stop herself.

[The Original Holy Knight, His Melancholy Gaze Conjures Autumn Even in Spring!]

The elaborate pen-and-ink illustration submitted under that ridiculous headline had been an irritating waste of the contributor’s considerable artistic talent, given how closely it resembled the real thing……

“What’s wrong with sharing a little candy with a hungry animal? You have plenty of money. Don’t be so stingy. Monsters are living things too. You could help them eat.”

Rose thought of yesterday, when she had broken into a sweat trying to stop Robert from tearing up the newspaper in a rage over that portrait, and fixed Jade with a disapproving look.

“You think I’m going to toss candy worth that much to a mongrel monster? It’s not like the thing was starving.”

Jade matched her expression with one just as sour.

“……How much was it worth?”

The ring.

Rose let her eyes go soft and asked the question gently.

How much had it been worth, really? Had Jade known its value when he traded it for candy? Or had he handed it over without a second thought, not knowing what kind of stone it was, and might he come back later claiming he’d made a mistake and demanding it back?

“Hard to say.”

Jade smiled, deliberately evasive.

His blue-green eyes, glowing with a subtle light, caught the color of the sky and the green of the forest and gave off an almost otherworldly atmosphere.

His lashes, damp and slightly heavy, cast a soft shadow over his eyes…… no. Not a soft shadow. More like a filthy shadow!

Rose shook her head and cleared out the nonsense the newspaper had planted there.

“I picked it up somewhere.”

Jade answered a beat late.

“Picked it up?”

“Mm. Back when I was doing my dueling tour through the Sibell Empire, I think.”

“In that country, you don’t have to return things you find to their owners?”

Rose pressed him, but Jade nodded without a care.

“You don’t. In ruins where adventurers come and go, whatever you pick up is yours by right.”

“Is that so?”

Rose spread her left hand open and looked at the ring.

She had been certain it was something forged by Camelot, but it had been picked up in the Sibell Empire. She had half-assumed Jade had smuggled out something made specifically for a Camelot noble……

The world was wide, and there were many skilled craftsmen in it.

“So don’t lose it.”

Jade added quietly, almost as an afterthought.

“It’s not yours anymore. Why does it matter?”

Rose shot back with a needlessly contrary smile. A newspaper column from two weeks ago had floated into her mind without warning.

[I saw the original Holy Knight with my own eyes. Returned now as a man in his twenties, his whispered voice has become a baritone that calls to mind the song of Physis, god of the wind……]