“……Sir?”

The man standing there, soaked through until the skin beneath his shirt was half-visible, lifted his downcast eyes and fixed them on her.

He wore a leather doublet of the kind favored in the Sibell Empire, with laces that could be loosened in that wild, open-fronted style. Against the neat dress of the Ordos, it looked out of place.

Gulp. Rose had the sensation of dark shadows rising from every part of Jade’s body as he looked at her.

The Jade Camelot she had always known, the uncomplicated and slightly manageable young man who showed quiet pleasure over a few pieces of candy, was not here.

Even through the black dark, his eyes blazed with a fierce, animal light. It was the gaze of a predator that had driven through a storm to run its prey to ground.

“Wh, what brings you here, Sir?”

Rose raised a hand toward the knights closing in to guard her, signaling that she was fine, and lifted her chin.

“Arriving unannounced at this late hour, forcing your way in like this, is beyond the bounds of common courtesy.”

She held to the composed and dignified manner expected of Ordo’s heir, but her lips were going dry despite herself.

What on earth possessed him to come here……

Jade said nothing. He only stared at her with a blank expression. If he could have moved a sword with his eyes alone, Rose would already have taken a fatal blow and fallen.

Then, slowly, he tilted his head to one side. That was all he did, and yet the Ordo knights flinched and tightened their grips on their swords.

“Miss Rosemaria has asked you to state your business! Speak!”

“If you take a single step, we will treat it as hostile intent and respond accordingly!”

“Oh, Rose!”

Anne creaked forward in her tension and planted herself in front of Rose.

“Stay behind your mother. Now then, my daughter has come out, so go ahead and state your business, Sir. Stand right where you are and tell us what you want, quickly.”

“Th, that’s right! Rose came out just as you asked!”

“Speak! Now! Let’s hear what on earth Camelot has to say to our Rose! Now!”

He came looking for me……

Rose flinched inwardly, feeling as though she had just been struck in a tender spot.

“Don’t worry, Rose. Mother will protect you.”

Anne misread her reaction and stood her ground with fierce resolve.

“W, we’ll protect you, Aunt!”

“Don’t worry, we’re here!”

The two brothers said the words but were completely frozen, plastered to Anne’s back. All that talk of war, and now, faced with Jade in the flesh, they had shriveled up like burnt potato scraps stuck to the bottom of a pan, and he was standing there alone.

To be fair, Rose had been genuinely startled when she first saw Jade after five years.

“Were you…… looking for me? Sir Jade.”

She braced herself for the worst and asked.

“……The scandal if any respectable family’s son had been caught bathing with you would have been bad enough, but if that man turned out to be a Camelot lackey? Our lord would pick up a sword for the first time in thirty years. That day would be the end of the continent.”

How far does he intend to expose things? Please, not the hot springs. I can’t lose Hilude……

Rose swallowed dryly. His cold, sunken expression gave nothing away. The only thing she could faintly sense was an intention to humiliate a traitor.

This woman broke her oath! She has no honor, no shame, she’s the kind of woman who shares a bath with a Camelot gorilla!

“Um, Sir Jade? There are too many people here and it’s too chaotic, so perhaps we should go somewhere quieter for a moment……”

“Rose.”

He only said her name.

A low, cool voice that people compared to the male god of winter-mountain Physis rang out briefly.

Yet that alone was enough to freeze the courtyard into perfect silence. Everyone stopped breathing, eyes wide, and stared at Jade.

No. Don’t.

Rose moved only her eyes, instinctively checking the position of any escape route.

“Why.”

Jade moved his lips slowly.

Time seemed to be grinding to a halt, and her mind was going numb, when:

“Why did you abandon me……?”

Tears streamed from both his eyes, tracing an oddly asymmetric path like lines of rain.

“Hup.”

Vivi’s sharp inhale from the entrance of the main building traveled through the silence and reached Rose’s ears.

“Why did you betray me?”

Fresh tears welled in Jade’s eyes almost immediately. The pained furrow of his brow expressed something that had no business being there, something that was neither anger nor mockery.

“So you’ve decided to throw away the promises we made. Those precious promises……”

In her dazed state, Rose had the vague thought that she had seen that expression somewhere before.

Was it at last year’s arts festival? The male lead in the Madame Bonbon Theatre Troupe’s performance of ‘Why Does the Wife of Sir Maurizio Cross Her Legs at a Man’s Tears’ at Belloti Square had worn exactly that look……

“No, I mean, the thing is—”

Back in reality, Rose shot a frantic glance at Vivi, signaling her to move out of the way.

But Vivi had both hands pressed to her flushed cheeks and was waiting breathlessly for whatever Jade would say next, not looking in Rose’s direction at all.

“Hoo.”

Jade let out a self-mocking breath and dropped his head. From between his pale lips came a trembling soliloquy, fragile as a wounded herbivore.

“To see everything there is to see and then abandon me without a care. For me, everything was a precious first…… Were the promises we made, the warmth we shared, the small treasures we exchanged truly nothing to you……?”

His voice, barely a breath, slightly hoarse, dissolved into the sound of the rain and spread through the air.

“Haah. Right now I feel as though I’m standing bare on the summit of Mount Physis in a snowstorm. Yes, since that day when I was three years old and declared firmly to the nursemaid bathing me that I would never show my bare body to any woman other than my beloved, and wrapped a towel around my lower half…… you are the only one I have ever permitted to see my legendary sword.”

“Wh, what! Saw everything! He already let her see his legendary sword?!”

Anton, who had gotten into trouble and married because of it, reacted sharply and grabbed the back of his neck.

The legendary sword. The ‘sword that cannot be drawn,’ a common motif in old stories.

“Are you out of your mind? What are you saying?”

Rose finally lost her composure and pushed through the knights.

“Miss!”

The horrified knights surged together and formed a wall between her and Jade.

“It’s dangerous, Miss!”

“Keep your distance, Miss Rosemaria!”

Anne and the two brothers, faces drained of color, clung to Rose.

“Oh, Rose! You’ll get yourself hurt! Come back here!”

“W, wait! It sounds like you did something wrong, so let’s just calm down first, all right?”

“Talk it out, Rose! And while we’re at it, you’d better tell us honestly just what exactly you’ve been getting up to! What have you been doing behind our backs with that Camelot beast?”

But Rose shook off everyone clinging to her like dust from a coat and charged straight at the consummate con artist.

“Aaagh!”

Knights cried out and scattered as she parted them like a wave, and her hand shot out and seized Jade by the collar.

“You, why are you doing this? You fraud……”

“Oh, that girl!”

“It’s dangerous, Miss!”

Let them shriek all they liked. Rose yanked Jade close until they were nose to nose, eyes blazing with the resolve to headbutt him if it came to that.

“Explain yourself. Do you know where you are? What do you think you’re doing? Have you lost your mind? What did you eat?”

For his part, Jade, collar in her grip, looked down at Rose without so much as a tremor. His eyes moved quietly over her face, studying her with a calm that made it hard to believe he had been shedding tears just moments ago.

“……Tell me it’s a lie, if it is.”

In a voice so composed it bordered on cold.

“Say it’s a lie, Rose.”

In a voice steady enough to make you doubt it could be anything but the truth.

“That’s……”

Even Rose was momentarily struck speechless.

“Why hesitate? All you have to do is deny it. Shed that suffocating label of last bastion of Ordo’s honor and give yourself a rest.”

“You, you……”

Of course Rose wanted to shout her grievances at the top of her lungs.