Just as I thought.

The area in front of the Siermaiem Grand Ducal Residence, which she had gone to check on the off chance, was exactly as expected, filled with women strolling about with nothing better to do.

White parasols in the hands of finely dressed women drifted along the clean, well-kept boulevard. Every one of them had gathered in front of his residence hoping for a chance encounter with the man who lived there.

She had expected this, but still…

Eleanor gazed through the carriage window at the young ladies walking with acute awareness of their surroundings and fell into thought.

More brazen than I imagined.

Then again, it made sense. Curtis Siermaiem’s standing in the social circles at present was in a class of its own.

The Kalind Empire, founded through the union of four kingdoms, operated under an elective monarchy.

The electors who held the right to choose the emperor were four Grand Dukes, all of them descendants of the royal families of the three kingdoms that had joined forces to build the empire.

All except one family. The Grand Ducal House of Siermaiem.

The reason the Grand Ducal House of Siermaiem had been elevated to elector despite having no royal blood from the North was simple.

They had rendered extraordinary service in the founding of the empire.

Some five hundred years ago, the dragon Kirgeinn settled in the Siovik Mountain Range. The creature, possessor of a vast store of mana that sent the blood of monsters into a frenzy at its mere passing, drove its subordinate creations into a literal rampage.

The number of monsters swelled in an instant. The beasts that armies had once managed to hold back, though with great difficulty, now rode the dragon’s power like a surging tide and attacked settlements without mercy.

The kingdom of Iluever, which shared a border with the Siovik Mountain Range, fell first under the terrible catastrophe. After it came Oriadun in the west, then Riagon in the east, each collapsing in turn.

The royal families of Iluever, who had fought at the front with honor only to see their entire line annihilated, were gone. The surviving royals of the other two kingdoms gathered in the southern kingdom of Narjes, which was barely holding on.

It was a time when the fate of the entire continent hung in the balance. A time when sealed gates and drawbridges burned to nothing overnight.

The royals, who had lost everything but their lives, decided to join forces and break through the crisis.

The founding of the Kalind Empire was proclaimed. It was a meaningless oath, the kind destined only for history books that would soon cease to exist.

Surely even the paper bearing the royal seals, stamped one after another, would have burned along with everything else.

Had it not been for Lestrange Siermaiem, who appeared like a divine apostle.

Lestrange Siermaiem, said to have originally been a priest at a small temple on the far edge of the kingdom of Iluever, reportedly received a divine oracle to save the empire and threw himself into battle.

Armed with nothing but a worn sword, Siermaiem made his way down from the ruined North all the way to southern Narjes, and in recognition of his deeds, the founding emperor granted him command authority. His army moved like arrows loosed by the gods, sweeping swiftly from the center through the west and east, and finally pushing all the way back up to the North.

And at last, after a grueling fight, the imperial army succeeded in k*lling the dragon that had made its home in the Siovik Mountain Range.

When the dragon Kirgeinn entered its eternal rest, the lakes that had been locked in ice thawed. The frost-covered land, dying white, reclaimed its color, and blue shoots pushed up from the earth above it.

The people, prostrate beneath the soft soil, offered their prayers to the names of the empire and Siermaiem.

It was only natural that Siermaiem, whose great deeds earned him recognition as a founding merit subject of the empire, came to occupy the elector’s seat in place of the vanished northern dynasty.

Without him, the empire would already have been trampled under the savagery of the monsters.

That was also why the empire, which strictly speaking should have been described as the union of three kingdoms excluding the northern kingdom of Iluever whose royal line had been wiped out, was instead called the union of four kingdoms.

The people of the North believed that the Grand Ducal House of Siermaiem had inherited the spirit of the honorable Iluever royal family. And not only the North, but all the people of the empire who had witnessed that history felt the same. Deep in their consciousness, the name of that newly born Grand Ducal House carried more weight than the crest of any royal family with centuries of tradition behind it.

And so the Kalind Empire came to have four electors, rooted in the South, the West, the East, and the North.

That these four families were the great noble houses that held the empire in their hands was something even a five-year-old child stopped on the street could have told you.

And at present, among all four Grand Ducal Houses, the only unmarried man who remained was Curtis Siermaiem alone.

His status as the sole heir of the Grand Ducal House of Siermaiem was already unrivaled, and his appearance and character came guaranteed on top of that. It goes without saying that he had reigned as the most coveted bachelor in the empire’s social circles for ten years running.

The proof of it was the scene unfolding right before her eyes. Those high-nosed ladies, drifting along in front of the Siermaiem Grand Ducal Residence with their unwrinkled dress hems fluttering.

But Sir Siermaiem would simply ignore those ladies entirely and slip in through the back.

Eleanor finished studying the pretty array of ruffles in every color and drew the old curtain across the window.

And even if he did come through the front gate, there was no chance he would notice her.

So this had been nothing more than a brief detour on a whim. She had no attachment to such a tired approach.

“Thomas. Head to the commercial district now.”

Eleanor made her decision and knocked on the carriage wall connecting to the driver’s seat, telling him to proceed to her original destination.

***

The wheels of the old carriage came to a stop at the far edge of the commercial district, between Districts 1 and 2. Eleanor straightened her skirt and hair out of habit, took the book she had brought with her, and stepped lightly down from the carriage.

Her feet in their new shoes found the way without hesitation to a coffee house on the outskirts. Summer Garden. Eleanor read the name of the tearoom once more, finding it rather lyrical, and stepped inside.

“Welcome!”

The interior of the newly opened cafe was bright and cozy, just like its name. The tablecloths were clean, and the chair cushions were new without a single worn spot.

In contrast, the tea sets behind the counter, used for brewing, all showed their age from long use. Not dirty or unsightly, just worn in a way that gave them a certain charm, the kind that lets you guess at the years spent holding them.

The daughter runs the cafe, and the mother handles the brewing, she had heard. Eleanor recalled what a fellow teacher had told her and ordered a slice of cake and a cup of peppermint tea to cleanse her palate.

The owner offered her a sunny window seat, but Eleanor declined and made her way to a corner with a clear view of the entire cafe interior. She settled there and faced the door.

The place sat in a quiet corner even within the outskirts of the commercial district, so foot traffic was sparse. Eleanor gazed absently through the window of the peaceful cafe, where birds came more often than people, and sank into thought.

The night she received her terminal diagnosis. What Eleanor had been staring at for a long time, having stopped mid-packing and sunk to the floor, was her scrapbook.

The salary of a teacher at Rodelline Girls’ Boarding School was not low compared to other schools, but it was not enough for a comfortable life either.

With her wages, which allowed her to put together a decent coat roughly once every two months if she was careful, Eleanor had been saving steadily. Her goal was to one day have enough for a place of her own.

Clothes and daily necessities kept to a bare minimum, living as frugally as possible, the one thing Eleanor never skimped on was newspapers.

From general papers to specialty publications, Eleanor subscribed to every newspaper she could get her hands on in the East without discrimination. Papers that did not deliver to the school she would go out to a nearby city on her days off to buy herself.

There was only one reason she devoured newspapers of every kind.

Curtis Siermaiem. To gather information about him.

Three years ago, after he saved her, Eleanor had collected every piece of news about him that circulated in the world without exception.

She had not been this devoted from the start. But a portrait of him printed in a newspaper she happened to come across, and the anecdote printed beneath it, had drawn her down the path of collecting.

What she had clipped and pasted one by one had piled up into several volumes before she knew it.

It could not be otherwise. Curtis Siermaiem was likely the most respected figure in the empire after the emperor himself.

Perhaps the emperor came after him.

Articles about the heir of a Grand Ducal House possessed of honor, wealth, means, and military power all at once poured out day after day without pause. His difficult family history, and the unbroken will and pride he carried in spite of it, were all dissected in full and laid out in print.

Not all of those articles were meaningful. A fair number contained distortions or outright falsehoods.

But Eleanor gathered and read and verified all of it, false information included.

Because she did not know Curtis Siermaiem as a person. Because she could not be certain what was fabricated and what was real.

But three years, even from a distance. There had been one time she had stood close enough to feel his presence and look at him directly.

By the time Eleanor finished her first scrapbook, she had developed a reasonable sense of which articles were exaggerated and which were not. It was something she could do in part because observation was a teacher’s particular skill.

Among all of those, there was one article she had paid especially close attention to. She had noticed it when she first clipped and pasted it, but even more so when she returned to it after her terminal diagnosis.

It was a feature article from a women’s weekly that had long since ceased publication. The weekly had followed Sir Curtis Siermaiem with relentless persistence and published the piece with great fanfare.

The iron-blooded knight’s unexpected hobby, it claimed, was visiting newly opened dessert shops to buy cake. The shield of the North had a surprising fondness for sweets, it seemed.

The reason Eleanor had studied that unremarkable piece so carefully was that the journalist who wrote it had once been disciplined for overly aggressive reporting. A journalist who had violated press ethics enough times to publish formal apologies in the paper was, for that very reason, someone whose content could be trusted.

Then this place is the most likely candidate.

Eleanor finished her recollection, settled into her certainty, and opened to the first page of the poetry collection she had brought from home.