Chapter 31

31

“Harry Miles ran off with his knights.”

“In the end, he never said a word of apology, but the young lady was extremely pleased.”

“Sir Hawk beat him like he was shaking the dust out of a quilt.”

“So… Jeni is safe?”

“Of course, of course.”

“Madam Sara went with her, so there’s no need to worry.”

“More to the point, my lord, is it true that you’re getting married in a month?”

“Ah… Yes, it turned out that way.”

Leonard nodded with an awkward look, and Thompson let out a sigh as if a great weight had finally been lifted.

“I’m relieved to hear it.”

“The mercenaries vouched for Sir Hawk’s identity, but I still couldn’t believe it…”

“But didn’t you say you were going up to sell the Raise Messer?”

“How on earth did you end up proposing to the Marchioness Blair?”

“I was the one who received the proposal.”

“What?”

Leonard added, as if talking in his sleep.

“And I received five hundred million Larc as a dowry.”

“What?! F-five hundred million Larc?”

Seeing Thompson so stunned his jaw nearly dropped, Leonard sighed.

Honestly, he was the one who felt more like asking whether this was a dream or reality.

“For now… I need to sleep.”

“I’m so tired my head won’t work.”

“What? Ah, yes.”

“Now that you mention it, you do look very tired.”

“Are you sure it’s all right to skip the meal?”

“Meal or no meal, I’m sleeping first.”

“Once I have, my thoughts should sort themselves out.”

Jenis was safe, whatever else was true.

That was enough.

Now that he had confirmed it, he felt he might finally be able to stop having nightmares.

Leonard didn’t even have the strength to make it to the bedroom, so he just flopped down on the sofa and closed his eyes.

Having slept less than ten hours in total over four days, he sank quickly into the swamp of sleep.

As expected, he no longer dreamed of Jenis dying, but a new dream crept into his consciousness instead.

* * *

Men who swaggered about promising ten thousand Larc, or a million Larc, when the contract was being drawn up, then turned their backs on you afterward, were a dime a dozen.

It was probably the same hundreds of years ago, which must be why Khan, the Mercenary King, stood at the first emperor’s side and helped him found the empire.

Thanks to that, even a lowborn mercenary could now accuse a noble, but the rotten judges sided with whoever slipped them money, so filing a complaint was worse than not filing at all.

After seeing and enduring every kind of filthy, petty thing, I finally realized.

That what’s closer than the law is a fist.

‘Brother, we caught Viscount Schulz’s messenger.’

‘They say he’s carrying a complaint against our company?’

‘Is he stupid?’

‘You should size up your opponent before bribing a judge…’

‘Just let him go.’

‘And have him carry a complaint of ours too, saying Viscount Schulz never paid us our fee.’

‘Yes, Brother!’

‘I told you to stop calling me that.’

Was I leading a mercenary company, or a gang of thugs from the back alleys?

With more than half of the newly recruited members coming from the back-alley fighting pits, it felt that way all the more.

Leonard pushed away the wearisome silver head and walked down the corridor of Schulz Castle.

‘Where’s the viscount?’

‘Tied up in the bedroom.’

‘Along with the viscountess.’

‘The viscountess?’

‘Did Viscount Schulz have a wife?’

‘I heard she died.’

‘That’s his first wife.’

‘This one was so damn pretty that he brought her in as a second wife with a huge dowry, but apparently she had no charm or something like that…’

‘They say that within a year she was cast aside and ended up shut away in a back room.’

The viscountess’s circumstances, which he’d heard from a servant of the castle, were truly wretched.

Stripped of every duty and right of a viscountess and practically confined to a tiny room, she was said to be visited now and then by the viscount, who’d bring a whip to vent his temper.

‘Why did you capture that poor woman too, instead of just leaving her alone?’

‘But Brother, you’re the one who told us to seize everyone in House Schulz, aren’t you?’

‘Rigid fools.’

What crime had that woman committed to be abused by her husband and put through this humiliation as well?

Suddenly, the face of his younger sister, buried deep in his memory, surfaced, and Leonard took a deep breath to hold down the rage welling up in him.

Jenis.

Thinking of that pitiful name, Leonard flung open the bedroom door roughly.

And their eyes met.

With the woman tied to the chair, weakly lifting her head.

Her blue eyes, gazing blankly at him, were empty, as if the soul had left them and only a shell remained.

Though they were plainly looking at each other, he had no sense at all that she was seeing him.

Perhaps that was why the thought came to him.

That he wanted to see himself fill those eyes.

* * *

Though various newspapers covered the matter in various tones, articles connected to Blair were, for the most part, only those two kinds.

Irenea flipped through the last newspaper and went “hm.”

“It’s quieter than I expected.”

“I was sure there’d be at least one headline like ‘Marchioness Blair, Cast Out by the Empress?'”

Marchioness Blair’s power came not from her coffers but from the Empress who doted on her.

So now, while she was out of the Emperor’s favor, was the perfect time to sink teeth into her.

Surely the jackals waiting for their chance couldn’t be unaware of this.

Irenea’s hand was thoroughly perfunctory as she tossed the newspaper onto the desk.

The papers she had already skimmed once lay scattered across her desk.

Gathering them up one by one and tidying them was Kiri’s job.

“Come to think of it, it’s not much of a punishment anyway.”

“Being confined for exactly one month until the wedding day—in a way, it almost seems like they’re being considerate and letting you devote yourself to the wedding preparations, doesn’t it?”

“It does, actually.”

“Thanks to it, I was able to cancel every audience I had scheduled, using it as my excuse.”

“Of course, there must have been some people who tried to use this chance to bite at you, Marchioness…”

“But I think the Emperor stopped the articles.”

“After all, His Highness the Second Prince is entangled in this too.”

“Right.”

“Besides, the train opening ceremony isn’t far off either.”

The train platforms and railway construction were among the national projects the Empress handled with the greatest care.

Naturally, selecting the sites to lay the tracks and build the stations alone took a very long time.

Once a railway was laid, the distance between that region and the capital shrank to as little as one day, or three or four days at most.

This was a great advantage and, at the same time, a great disadvantage.

It meant they would be easier for the Emperor to keep watch over.

Of course, the Empress felt the burden just the same.

Frankly, if someone brought a whole train loaded with knights and soldiers, what an uproar there would be in the capital!

So the Emperor, after deliberating again and again, picked nobles he could trust and chose their domains as candidate sites for the stations.

But sadly, those nobles saw the drawback of having the Emperor at their backs as greater than the profit to be gained from building a station.

They conferred among themselves and sent the Emperor an extremely respectful letter of refusal.

[ Since this is a large-scale national project to be carried out over the long term, it seems best to proceed first in the domains where circumstances are difficult. ]

How could the Emperor not know they hadn’t yielded out of goodwill?

The Emperor, who had made a generous offer in the spirit of bestowing imperial favor, ground his teeth in resentment.

It was at that very moment that Irenea quietly made her request to the Empress.

Couldn’t he lay that railway in the South, where her domain was?

“Well, Her Majesty wants to lay railways across the entire empire, beginning with the Blair marquisate.”

To do that, at the very least, she couldn’t look like she had fallen out with Blair until another station was built in some other region.

If he cast out the Marchioness Blair he had doted on so much the moment the station was built, what would the other nobles think the reason was?

-So the train really must have been built to keep watch over the nobles!

‘Well, after just one year, everyone will be clamoring to build a station in their own domain.’

Nobles who had ever tucked away a little something on the side, out of the Emperor’s sight, were afraid of inspectors sent by the Emperor descending on their domains without a sound, though.

In the past, Weindal Castle, where the first station was built, had enjoyed an unprecedented boom, to the point of being called the second capital.

With the development of the Great Forest of Weinberg underway as well, merchant companies and businesses of every sort, unable to settle in the capital because land prices there were too steep, had all flocked there.

‘If Duke Baldwin had just quietly agreed to build a station, a railway would have been laid in our domain too!’

‘That idiot!’

-Thud!

“Marchioness?”

“Hm? …Ah, a bad thought suddenly crossed my mind.”

Her fist, which she had unconsciously slammed down on the desk, stung.

When Irenea unclenched her fist and waved it to say it was nothing, Kiri let out an “ah.”

“Come to think of it, it’s about time we heard from the Clayo branch.”

“Clayo… You’re right, he’s not the type to stay this quiet.”

From the moment she had asked Selen to arrange a meeting with Leonard, the wedding preparations had already been underway.

And the moment Leonard accepted the proposal, Irenea sent out all the wedding invitations she had prepared in advance.

Of course, she didn’t leave out Viscount Calio either.

He, who still couldn’t give up playing the good uncle, would sit in the family seats at Irenea’s side, smiling and clapping.

No, he had to.

“Do you think Uncle has any way of ruining my wedding?”

“Perhaps he’ll try to reach out to the future consort?”

“Right, with less than a month left until the wedding, that’s the only way left.”

But Irenea wasn’t the least bit worried about what tricks her uncle might try on Leonard.

‘Because he is a man who would never betray his word.’

Leonard always kept what he promised.

As long as Irenea didn’t break her promise first, he would never betray her.

But…

‘I wish he wouldn’t betray me because he loved me.’

When she simply wasn’t seeing him, she had been able to comfort herself, but after facing him and talking with him, the greed she had pressed down so hard swelled up like smoke.

“I miss him…”

Kiri’s gaze fell on Irenea as she let out a long sigh.

Just as she opened her mouth to ask a question, the sound of knocking came at the door.