The number of elite knights from the Siermaiem Knight Order who had come up to the Capital for their regular report was not overwhelming. Yet their strict military discipline, their refined but undeniable iron bearing, drew reverence from the people around them.

The well-maintained plate armor caught the sunlight and blazed like a river rippling at midday. The knights, stone statues atop massive horses, held their formation without a single break and moved as one body.

It was a sight that went beyond majestic, reaching something almost sacred. In fact, Thomas and several other older men had gone so far as to remove their hats and hold them to their chests.

But all those grand scenes slid past Eleanor’s attention. She fixed her gaze on a single point and watched a single person.

She could do nothing else. The whole world seemed erased, leaving only one thing behind, and while everything else blurred, he alone stood sharp and clear.

Curtis Siermaiem.

Eleanor recited his name like a prayer and looked up at him where he rode high above her, her eyes full of reverence.

Most imperial citizens who knew the history of war carried inflated fantasies about the Grand Ducal House of Siermaiem.

That the heir of the Grand Ducal House would be as mighty as a warrior from myth, as righteous as a divine apostle, as supreme as a being who had surpassed the limits of humanity.

But how could that be? However great their influence on the founding of the empire, the Grand Ducal House of Siermaiem was still just a family built by human hands. Such fantasies had no business being real.

And yet the figure drawing closer made her think that the impossible story might actually be true.

Curtis Siermaiem, mounted on a gleaming, powerful stallion, looked like he had just stepped out of the imagination people never tired of talking about.

His hair, like finely ground obsidian poured smooth, had not faded in the slightest despite the hazy dust in the air. His face, set with nobly luminous blue eyes, held the beauty of a goddess’s knight.

The strong jaw beneath lips pressed firmly shut with solemn purpose, the thick neck below it, the powerful warrior’s body that matched the great sword at his hip as though made for it together, all of it lent truth to that imagination.

He looked like a glorified historical painting of a scene from the founding legend, riding straight toward her.

But Eleanor did not look at him and see the glory of the empire. She saw an individual.

You aren’t hurt.

The speed a well-trained warhorse could reach was incomparable to anything a draft horse pulling a carriage could manage. Yet Eleanor could study him as closely as someone peering into a cart pulled by a sickly mule.

She had worried, hearing that the knights had been attacked by monsters several times while repairing the fortress walls along the Siovik Mountain Range.

He was certainly someone who could conceal an injury with ease, but at least on the surface, nothing appeared seriously wrong.

That’s a relief. You look well. She repeated it only to herself, and watched him pass by her without a glance, stirring a great rush of wind as he went.

Just as she had expected, there was no miracle of eyes meeting across the distance between his high place and hers.

The hair she had carefully arranged and the hem of her skirt had both been reduced to a dusty mess.

But Eleanor, unable even to think of tidying herself the way she once would have, simply stood and watched the silver wave grow smaller for a long time.

***

“Welcome back, miss!”

If there was one good thing about coming to the Capital, it was being able to see the familiar faces she had missed for so long.

“It’s been a while, Mia.”

The journey had taken longer than expected, and her return to the family home was somewhat delayed. Tired as she was, Eleanor looked at the freckle-covered face of the maid and smiled with genuine warmth.

“Have you been well?”

The longtime maid who had welcomed her in the absence of the house’s mistress seemed to choke up, scrunching her nose once before breaking into a tearful smile.

“Why did you stay away so long? I missed you so much.”

She spoke quickly, then turned her back as though to hide her reddened eyes and snatched the luggage from Thomas.

“You must be hungry. Rest for a moment and I’ll bring you a nice stew.”

Then she gripped the handle of the worn brown bag tightly and hurried inside. Eleanor, still holding a smile at the corner of her lips, followed the quick, shuffling steps that were so distinctly Mia’s.

“Miss, don’t tell me you still dislike tomatoes…”

But the two pairs of shoes keeping pace with each other were heading to different destinations. Eleanor had been moving naturally toward the second floor where her room had always been, and she looked at Mia with puzzlement as the maid carried her luggage toward the kitchen instead.

“Weren’t you going to put the bags down first?”

“Ah, well…”

Discomfort crossed Mia’s face. Eleanor waited for an explanation with a strange premonition, and the butler, who had been standing nearby doing little more than pretending to attend to things, cut in abruptly.

“Miss Eleanor’s room is currently under renovation. I apologize, but it seems you will need to use a room on the first floor for the time being.”

The butler’s face as he delivered this was calm, the picture of someone speaking nothing but the plain truth. But Eleanor could have wagered every last thing she owned that the renovation of that room would never end, that the day she climbed back up to the second floor would never come.

“I see.”

Even knowing that her room had finally been taken from her, Eleanor replied without a trace of distress and moved toward the kitchen. She turned to Mia, who stood caught between the butler and her young mistress, not knowing what to do.

“Then Mia, would you show me to the room I’m to stay in for the time being?”

The place Mia led her to, wearing the face of a child being punished, was one of the maid’s rooms tucked behind the kitchen.

“It still gets the best sunlight of any room on the first floor. The cooking smells don’t really come through, and there’s a desk and a wardrobe too… Oh, and just outside that window, small as it is, there are violets in bloom! You wouldn’t believe how strong the fragrance is at night.”

“Is this originally your room, Mia?”

“Of course not!”

Mia said so, but Eleanor could see through her lie just as she had seen through the butler’s.

In all likelihood, the room Lady Aster had ordered given to her was somewhere even more remote and shadowed than this, a room for a maid-in-training. Mia, unable to stand by and let that happen, had pleaded with the butler and switched it for her own room.

“Of all the times for the guest rooms to need renovation, it had to be when you arrived, miss! Something about not being able to miss the social season?”

Sensing that Eleanor did not believe her, Mia talked on with deliberate chatter and opened the old wardrobe door, tucking the modest luggage neatly inside one piece at a time.

Eleanor had been watching quietly, her eyes resting on the busy back of someone who had always been kind to her despite receiving nothing in return, when she felt a gaze and turned her head.

Ben Braden, the Aster family butler, had followed her all the way into the servants’ quarters and stood looking her room over with the air of someone taking in a curiosity.

“Ben.”

Eleanor watched the butler conducting himself like a visitor at a zoo and spoke in a low voice.

“Is this room originally yours, not Mia’s?”

“Of course not, miss.”

“Then what is the meaning of that rudeness?”

At the blunt, unvarnished rebuke, the young butler’s face went rigid.

Ben was one of the servants her stepmother had brought with her when she entered the household. The fact that she had gone to the trouble of driving out the butler who had served the Aster family faithfully for years and installing Ben in his place said everything about how deep her stepmother’s trust in him ran.

“Try not to show so much of yourself.”

But what does it matter? I don’t even have a room in this house anymore. And I have no future left here to speak of.

Calling to mind the verdict that had been handed down to her and the little time she had left, Eleanor looked at the butler’s twisted expression with a composed face and said,

“What are you waiting for? Go.”

***

“Did you hide treasure here, sir?”

Chad Hughes, adjutant of the Grand Ducal House of Siermaiem, asked, stealing a glance at the river visible beyond his superior’s broad shoulders.

The Idela River, designated as the boundary between Districts 2 and 3 to draw a clear line between the residences of nobles and commoners, was a landmark that defined the Capital.

Every ambitious and wealthy merchant dreamed of living somewhere with a view of the Idela River. Every noble who wanted nothing to do with the commoners’ living quarters hoped to live as far from the Idela River as possible.

The direction of their desires differed, but the feeling both groups held toward the river was the same.

The river that fed Elvira, the Capital. A place of peace that offered room to breathe in the crowded city.

There was a difference in that commoners boasted of how often they went, while nobles boasted of having made the rare effort to visit, but the fact that everyone loved the Idela River remained the same.

It could not be otherwise. In a capital where greenery was scarce, a river flowing serenely alongside beautiful nature was certainly something worth favoring.

It was late spring, when all living things had finally come into bloom. Chad Hughes, gazing out beyond the river that seemed to shine all the more brilliantly as though unwilling to disappoint those who had come to see it, narrowed his eyes and asked,

“It’s under that plane tree, isn’t it? Where you’ve hidden the treasure.”

“……”

“You keep looking over toward that tree, sir. Just tell me quietly. It’s buried there, isn’t it?”

He tried his hand at a bit of playfulness, but the answer that came back from his mountain-silent superior was the same as always.

“Chad.”

“Yes.”

“Shut it.”