Ugh. Which editor had come up with the terrible idea of making the reader submissions column in Monthly Cultured Citizen anonymous? If contributors had to put their names to it, no one would ever dare submit such fraudulent eyewitness accounts.

It was surely some Camelot lackey pretending to be a woman and planting fake sightings……

“Lose that ring and you’ll be cursed, Rose.”

Jade lowered his voice with deliberate ominousness.

“Beautiful gemstones always come with at least one deadly story attached.”

Something about it tickled her ear in a way that made her want to scratch it. Rose shook the water from her fingers, dug a finger into her ear, and said:

“Then I’ll consider it a temporary loan from you. If I lose it, the curse goes to you as the ring’s owner.”

“Ha.”

Jade’s gaze rested on her face for a moment, then drifted slowly upward toward the sky, as though appealing to the heavens. It was laughable, really. He’s not a particularly devout man, and yet the moment things turned against him, he looked to the sky for rescue.

“Never mind that. Check on the poor wolf. Stop clutching it like a log and pet it a little, tell it to get its strength back. A monster shouldn’t stay in a sacred zone too long.”

Rose nudged him, and Jade bowed his head almost on instinct.

He studied the wolf’s face for a moment. Then his expression went cold.

“……You’re wide awake and pretending to sleep? Sneaky little mutt.”

Whimper, the wolf let out a pitiful cry at being caught, but Jade showed no mercy and flung it unceremoniously away.

The wolf twisted gracefully in midair, hit the water, and swam to shore with practiced ease. It shook itself dry with a brisk shudder and bolted past the boundary, where its pack greeted it with panting, eager yelps.

Rose found herself smiling at the monsters behaving exactly like ordinary dogs.

“Why did you even take the candy back? It’s ruined now anyway, covered in saliva.”

“I hate dogs.”

Jade said it flatly.

“So what? Even a noble should feel some compassion for living things, regardless of personal preference.”

“Let’s trade again.”

“……Show me what you have.”

Rose tilted her chin.

“Hmm.”

Jade had brought it up himself, but he hesitated, unable to settle on something to offer.

For some reason he didn’t even glance at his own hands this time, despite the fact that the rings he hadn’t given Rose last time were still on his fingers.

After a brief pause, he spoke.

“Today all I have is my body.”

“Not buying.”

The deal fell through.

“That filthy beast, how dare he try to sell his disgusting body to someone!”

Terra unleashed a torrent of insults at their exchange, but neither Rose nor Jade paid her any mind. They closed their eyes in unspoken agreement and settled back into the hot spring.

The candy dissolved on Rose’s tongue. She opened her green leather pouch and took out a second piece.

Jade’s eyes snapped open at once, drawn by the scent of something sweet, and his gleaming gaze fixed on her lips just as she was about to put the candy in her mouth.

Rose parted her lips with deliberate slowness and placed the candy on her tongue.

Grrr. A sound rose from his throat, not unlike the wolves that had just lost their pack leader.

“Rose.”

“I said I’m not buying.”

“Are you going to get married?”

Jade asked, staring at her with an intent that could have swallowed her whole.

“Hmm?”

Married, out of nowhere? Rose asked back, puzzled, and turned the question over in her mind. It only took a few seconds to arrive at an answer.

Ah. So the competition over my marriage must be a topic of conversation in Camelot too.

“I suppose I will.”

“You will?”

He repeated it with a meaningful look, as though he found it hard to believe.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

A successful marriage, a strategically advantageous one, was everyone’s goal, wasn’t it?

Of course, she would have preferred a little more time. To decide more carefully. To wait for someone she felt more certain about……

That thought made her glance at Jade with vague resentment.

“It’s your fault, you know. If it weren’t for you, I could have held out a few more years. You came back out of nowhere and started going on about marriage meetings, and now my family won’t leave me alone. Thanks to you, it looks like it’s happening sooner rather than later.”

There were other reasons Rose had recently begun to consider marriage more seriously, but Jade’s return had certainly been a significant catalyst.

She was an Ordo, and she couldn’t help it.

She was someone who couldn’t help being aware of Camelot.

“So? Alberty Berna is the man worthy of beating out those Ordo rats?”

Jade twisted his lips in a sneer. The sharp contempt that flashed in his eyes in that moment was something Rose couldn’t make any sense of.

“Who is Alberty Berna?”

The name was completely unfamiliar.

“The second son of the lord of Vicenza, Miss.”

It was Terra who answered, not Jade. She kept her eyes on the wolves rolling happily in the grass outside the spring as she continued.

“A businessman active in the capital. Twenty-one years old, 185 centimeters tall, hobby is playing the violin. He’s the one who said he would come to House Ordo as a live-in son-in-law if you would only agree, Miss.”

“There was someone like that?”

The name meant nothing to Rose.

He was probably one of the many proposals from some time ago. It was hard to keep track of every name on the list Anne recited each Monday with the enthusiasm of a mandatory routine announcement.

Unless there had been something genuinely interesting about the parade of men who all praised the same two things, her beauty and her courage, in exactly the same words……

“I don’t really know who that is.”

“Is that so?”

Something in Jade’s expression softened, just slightly.

“I did think it was strange. A man who strums an instrument with delicate fingers couldn’t possibly handle Ordo’s rats.”

So he was relieved there was no risk of being overtaken by Ordo’s daughter. But why bother putting down someone else’s suitor?

Rose made no effort to hide the flash of pique and smiled as she fired back.

“What’s wrong with playing an instrument? Haven’t you heard that a man who knows nothing of art is lower than a beast? Even wild birds know how to sing a beautiful song when they court a mate.”

Mother and Father were right about everything, it seemed.

She needed to pick a husband as quickly as possible, before she lost to this one.

“Wild birds don’t play the violin, Rose.”

Jade answered with the same easy smile.

“But violin playing is just as wonderful as singing.”

Rose shrugged unhurriedly and went on.

“There’s an old saying that people of Hailion may never learn table manners but they always learn to play an instrument. I’ve never met Alberty Berna, but I’d wager he’s a far more refined and elevated person than you, someone who dismisses anything outside his own interests.”

“Oh. Is that so?”

The warmth drained from Jade’s expression entirely. He looked, for some reason, like a soldier who had just been betrayed by a trusted ally.

“Yes, that’s so. And you can’t even sing, Jade Camelot.”

Rose smiled with her eyes and delivered the finishing blow to the defeated soldier.

“I’m curious too. What kind of woman is going to end up with a savage who knows nothing but the sword.”

That’s what you get for putting down someone else’s suitor.

“……”

Jade said nothing more in his defense, conceding defeat in silence. He simply watched her.

But that look, rippling with a quiet, steady contempt, felt slightly unfamiliar to Rose.

Picking pointless quarrels was also something he hadn’t done before.

The Jade she had known long ago was, aside from the occasional strange remark, actually a fairly mild-mannered person beneath the sharp tongue……

“How dare that insolent beast stare at someone like that!”

Terra seemed to feel the discomfort too and reached for her sword hilt in warning. But Jade’s gaze, fixed on Rose, didn’t shift at all.

Time seemed to stop. The three of them stayed still.

Seconds passed, or perhaps minutes.

“Ha……”

No explosion. No violence. Jade simply let his chest rise and fall in one great breath and exhaled, like a pot with a safety valve built into the lid.

“Stop finding fault with my future wife, would you? It’s not as though I’ll ever get married anyway……”

His tone was light, almost wounded, and Rose felt a pang of awkwardness.

She hadn’t particularly meant to find fault with his future wife.

And what kind of wound could teasing him about never getting married possibly inflict? In reality, women willing to marry him were lined up from one end of the Empire to the other.