“Uh…”
The sudden confession of loyalty left me tongue-tied. Not knowing how to answer, I scratched the bridge of my nose and looked at him.
Why was he ready to lay down his life over a single remark from the heir that she would work hard as Head of House?
Matthew was now dabbing at his tears with his cuff, overcome with emotion.
“All right, Matthew. I’ll become the proper Head of House and do my best. Um, for now, would you leave? So I can look at the documents.”
I somehow managed to coax Matthew out. Even on his way out, he kept going on about the history and glory of House Irenber.
I lost count of how many toe-curling compliments he heaped on me, saying how glad he was that I would carry on Irenber’s brilliant history and glory.
“Goodness, my head is spinning.”
Returning to the sofa and sitting down, I thought of the Matthew of the past.
After my parents died, Matthew had looked after me like a baby bird. Then one day he had begun to keep his distance.
I had assumed he’d been bought off by Count Kolkos, but seeing him today, it seemed Matthew had been disappointed that I had no interest in the house.
Come to think of it, Matthew was never friendly with Count Kolkos either.
Unless Count Kolkos came to the Irenber mansion, the two had no occasion to meet.
And I suspected a man like that.
Doubting those around me, tapping every stone bridge before crossing it, was well and good, but rather than suspecting blindly, I should observe more carefully.
With my suspicion of Matthew gone, it felt as if I had set down one of the burdens weighing on my shoulders. With a much lighter heart, I buried myself in the pile of documents.
Reading them did not take long. Apart from the report laid on top, they were mostly petitions written by those among the estate’s residents who could write.
Nobel is the problem.
The most barren of all of Irenber’s lands, Nobel.
Nobel was the only land in the kingdom where monsters lived.
As the fiery war between monsters and humans drew to a close, the king had driven the remaining monsters into Nobel.
Its land was vast, but it lay at the far end of the north, ringed by mountains, and was cold three seasons out of the year.
Perhaps that was why they had judged it no great loss to hand such a land over to the monsters.
And Irenber had taken charge of that land. Since then, for several hundred years, every spring the foremost knights set out on an expedition to Nobel.
The Silver Expedition.
That expedition, with its romantic name, was nothing more than a monster-slaughtering corps.
Nobel was an estate that was only a burden to Irenber. And yet Father had loved Nobel.
Because it was Mother’s hometown.
A love story between a simple country girl and a lord’s son. How about that.
The simple girl who lived in Nobel and the heir of the house, who had come leading the Silver Expedition, had fallen in love at first sight.
How romantic.
Father had always told me to marry for love.
I didn’t listen to Father, tried to marry without thinking, and ruined my life.
So one really should listen to one’s parents.
Nobel, where Mother was born and raised and where Father had fallen in love, was an estate with plenty of talk and plenty of trouble.
And reading the report, I remembered. Around this very year, the people of Nobel, worn down by taxes, had started a riot.
Count Kolkos, who was my guardian at the time, had tried to put them down by force. The Silver Expedition had swung their swords not at monsters but at the people of Nobel.
The enraged people of Nobel had then smashed the monster boundary stones, and everything had descended into chaos.
That stupid Count Kolkos!
Thinking of him, anger wrapped around my whole body.
“My lady, you’re crumpling the documents.”
I must have tightened my grip on them without realizing it. Janice said so as she set down the tea she had brought. I smoothed the papers out again and smiled awkwardly.
“Butler Matthew thought you would be hungry and had this prepared for you.”
Janice set a plate of sweet cookies and a teacup side by side in front of me.
Maybe I was hungry from overworking my head, or maybe it was the sweet smell, but my mouth began to water.
I had to read the documents, but I wanted to eat too.
“Please eat while I go and get your meal ready.”
Janice insisted I eat, so I had no choice but to hold the documents in one hand and a cookie in the other.
I did not even notice Janice leaving, so absorbed was I in the papers.
Matthew had called them documents on the revision of the provincial tax law, but more than specific numbers, they were mostly the complaints of estate residents about how hard taxes had made their lives.
Which means this isn’t a problem that fixing a few numbers will solve.
Crunch, I chewed a cookie as I concentrated.
If I cut taxes, someone will take a hit, so I can’t just meddle with the tax law.
On top of that, House Irenber’s tax rate was markedly lower than anyone else’s, and even now I heard complaints from the heads of other houses.
And on top of that, Nobel already has a lower rate than other regions.
To lower taxes further, the only way was to reduce the tax collected by the royal capital, but even if I was Irenber, I couldn’t just go to the king and tell him out of the blue to lower taxes.
And Nobel already paid less in royal taxes than other regions. Because the king, too, knew about the damage the monsters caused.
Huh? What’s this? The tax went up right after Father died?
But as I went through the documents, something strange caught my eye.
Nobel’s taxes had gone up.
Nobel was a special region where monsters appeared, so to raise its taxes, the Head of House and the king had to negotiate, if only as a formality.
Yet I had no memory of any such negotiation.
Of course, it might have been because I was not yet the proper Head of House. But it was strange that I could not even recall hearing that a negotiation was taking place.
At present Irenber had no one with the standing to negotiate on the house’s behalf, and in that case word should at least have reached me, as was proper.
Did His Majesty raise the taxes on his own? I’ll have to raise a formal objection.
That, too, was something only the Head of House could do.
But I couldn’t just sit with my hands folded, watching. If I couldn’t become Head of House right away, I would have to find some other way.
What do I do? Even if the tax was raised arbitrarily, I can’t lower taxes for Nobel alone.
“Because monsters appear” was a phrase that had been used far too often. However great the actual damage, to outsiders it would sound like an out-of-season excuse.
Just how bad are things there?
I would have to go to Nobel myself.
To see the estate’s circumstances with my own eyes, to find out whether there was some way to solve things within Nobel, and why the monsters were running wild.
But going right now was out of the question. I couldn’t go to Nobel empty-handed and alone.
And the people of Nobel would surely welcome me more as Head of House than as the Head’s daughter.
All the more reason to hurry and win over my cute little prince.
Since I’m thinking of it, shall I go and see Cassion?
I tidied the documents I had read to one side and shook the cookie crumbs from my hands. Just as I was about to rise from my seat, the door burst open with a bang.
“Brought him. The lunatic.”
Cho dropped a huge bundle she had been dragging at my feet. With a dull thud, the enormous lump twitched.
“This is what I asked for?”
Surely she hadn’t brought a person in a sack? And dragged him, no less?
Unable to believe it, I pointed at the bundle with a finger.
“He put up a fight.”
Cho shrugged as though it were nothing.
“You’re remarkably strong, Aunt.”
While praying that Cho had brought Lebert in one piece, I was purely impressed by her monstrous strength.
Dragging a sack with a person in it all the way up to a fourth-floor room. Was that possible for a human?
“I’ve got something good.”
Cho grinned and held up a hand.
The leather glove she wore had a mana stone set into it.
Which meant an expensive magic tool.
A magic tool was an object set with a mana stone and bound with a permanent spell. The price of a magic tool varied enormously depending on the type of permanent spell. Naturally, the more advanced the spell on an item, the more it cost.
A magic tool that amplified strength required an extremely high-level spell, and mana stones capable of bearing such a spell were hard to come by.
Mana stones formed when the bones of monsters, buried underground for a long time, transformed.
It already took a long time for them to transform, and not every monster’s bone would do. Only the bones of monsters that held mana could turn into mana stones.
On top of that, they were hard to dig up and hard to process.
With the number of mages drastically reduced these days, demand for mana stones was high and supply was nowhere near enough. Naturally, the price of mana stones had skyrocketed.
In a word, the thing Cho was wearing was,
a rare item.
Where had she gotten it?
It’s not the sort of thing an aunt who scrambles to pay her subordinates’ wages should own.
“I didn’t steal it. What do you take your aunt for?”
I must have looked at her with suspicion without meaning to, because Cho creased her brow.
“An information hunter. And there’d be nothing strange about turning information into money. You always went around saying information is money, Aunt.”
I muttered as I undid the knot Cho had tied in the sack.
“Did I ever say that to you?”
Of course she hadn’t. That famous saying was one that Chorni was said to have uttered after working as spies and bringing some country’s war to an end.
And that war won’t happen for several more years.
It was a thing I must not act as if I knew.
“You said it once, in passing. Anyway, he’s alive, right?”
Aunt was not sensitive about anything that wasn’t a matter of trade, so I could probably pass it off loosely.
“Open it and see.”
Instead of answering me, Cho nudged the sack with her foot. Without a firm answer, I grew uneasy. I hurriedly opened the sack.
Through the opening, along with a foul stench, came the sight of a person crumpled inside.
“My lady! Your meal! Eek!”
Janice appeared.
She saw Cho and me, and the blood-streaked sky-blue hair sticking out between me and the sack I was holding, and her eyes blazed with light.
“My lady, it’s dangerous!”
Janice practically threw down the tray of food and rushed over.
Did she know that Janice rushing at me was the scarier sight?
She pulled me away from the sack and hauled Lebert out of the bundle. It was the moment Janice’s monstrous strength shone.
Janice laid Lebert flat on the floor and pressed her ear to his chest to check his breathing.
“He’s alive, my lady.”
“You don’t have to go that far, I can tell he’s alive. But we can’t leave him like this. Aunt, would you move him to the bed for now?”
“Have the attendants do it. Do I look like a drudge to you?”
“Not the attendants! We can’t have them finding out that a man caked in blood is in our cute, lovable lady’s room!”
Janice objected and added,
“If we’re going to be found out, at least let it be after he’s cleaned up!”
“…What difference does that make?”
Cho asked Janice in a tone of utter incomprehension.
Janice answered, her voice still excited.
“Because that way, even if rumors spread, they’ll be tidy ones! My lady has her tastes too, you know!”
Um, I think I know what kind of rumor that is, but I’m only thirteen? Even a plain romance rumor is something I’d decline at this age.
“Janice, stop talking and let’s lift him.”
Cho showed no sign of helping, so moving Lebert fell to me and Janice.
His ankles are so thin.
I knew how the black-market dealers treated the children they took from the slums.
The children must have been hurt and sick a great deal.
Had Lebert come to develop his groundbreaking medicine because, as a child, he had treated his injured friends with his own hands?
It was a reasonable suspicion.
