A few days later, a message arrived from Leone Collozzo. His lengthy letter could be summarized in a single sentence:
I shook every tree I could find. It wasn’t any of my people.
Hyderlin sent back a reply of equal brevity:
Good work.
Leone was apparently deeply aggrieved by her terseness, but that was hardly Hyderlin’s problem. She had far too much to occupy her lately to spend any energy worrying about the feelings of a criminal.
She dragged Sarg with her through every corner of the slums, but they found neither useful witnesses nor testimonies. The search continued to stall.
The Baron and Baroness Roditchi were teetering on the edge of a grief-mad breakdown.
And then, the youngest Roditchi son appeared.
“Some days ago, I happened upon this young gentleman collapsed in the street. He seemed of gentle birth, yet I could not determine which household he belonged to, so I took him under my protection—I had no idea it would all come to this.”
A week after the disappearance, the second son of Count Marcelo arrived at the castle, a ten-year-old boy in hand.
“The young lord only recovered his senses last evening. Once he was able to tell us his name, we made for the castle without delay.”
Baron and Baroness Roditchi wept as they pulled their youngest son into their arms.
Marcelo expressed that he wished to compensate the couple for their suffering during the ordeal, and pressed upon them a considerable sum.
“Then is the investigation concluded?”
In response to Hyderlin’s question, Chesa ran a hand along his jaw.
Now that it had been established that the slum disappearances were unrelated to the Roditchi boy’s case, there was technically no need for the Captain of the Royal Guard to involve herself further. But Chesa shook his head.
“If we close the case like this, I won’t be able to face Margarite. Dig a little deeper.”
And so Hyderlin agreed to continue the investigation alongside Sarg. There were things nagging at her regardless.
“The Marcelo family is suspicious.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
The disappearance of the youngest Roditchi had only become known in Nadirotsa’s noble circles a few days prior. Yet the day Marcelo’s second son appeared at the castle happened to be the day after Hyderlin had declared her intention to expand the scope of the search after coming up empty in the slums.
“Still, suspicion alone isn’t enough to justify a search of his estate…”
Hyderlin was tapping her chin in thought when she snapped her fingers. She gestured for Skalts.
Since she had assumed the role of Captain of the Royal Guard, Skalts Petaora had become her adjutant.
“Sir Skalts Petaora. Find me a suitable excuse.”
Hyderlin drove Skalts relentlessly until he had dug up a vulnerability in the Marcelo household. Skalts quietly wept on the inside while gathering intelligence, and in the end, Hyderlin found exactly the kind of pretext she needed.
“Young Master Marcelo. I understand you recently brought in a large shipment of spirits?”
“That is correct.”
“You may or may not be aware, but under the laws of this kingdom, purchasing more than ten bottles of Alnotchi grain liquor in a single month is strictly prohibited.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“According to your receipts, you purchased twelve bottles this month.”
“I beg your—”
“Terribly sorry, but I’m afraid I’ll have to confiscate those. Search the premises.”
“Excuse me?”
The Royal Guards fanned out through the Marcelo estate. The second son of Count Marcelo looked on with an expression of pure bewilderment.
While it was technically a violation of the law to purchase more than ten bottles of grain spirits in a month, it was the sort of thing that was almost universally overlooked. And even when it was enforced, it certainly wasn’t within the jurisdiction of the Captain of the Royal Guard.
Antonic Marcelo, the second son of Count Marcelo, caught up to Hyderlin as she strolled leisurely through his estate and attempted to placate her with a gentle touch.
“My father’s health is quite poor. Should he hear of this commotion, his condition will surely worsen…”
“We’ll conduct the search quietly and be on our way. No need for undue worry.”
“Sir Biche. Surely a woman as busy as yourself needn’t waste her time on something as trivial as this.”
“Trivial? Upholding the sacred laws of this kingdom is a matter of the utmost importance.”
Antonic said a few more things that Hyderlin let wash over her without listening.
“My, what a peculiar vase this is.”
Hyderlin had drifted to the far wall and was staring, with every appearance of genuine interest, at the flower vase displayed there. She could not have said whether it was beautiful, but it was certainly striking—riddled with holes punched all over its surface.
“Your eye is impeccable, Milady. That vase was procured from Larrochelle at considerable difficulty. If it pleases you, allow me to present it as a gift.”
Marcelo called for a servant to have the vase wrapped. Hyderlin caught a fleeting glimpse of the servant pouring gold coins into the vase before covering it, and clicked her tongue.
Well, well. If that’s the kind of thing he feels compelled to do, he clearly has something to hide.
She watched in silence as the vase was carefully wrapped in cloth and placed inside a wooden box. When Antonic Marcelo held the box out to her, Hyderlin raised both hands and declined.
“No, there’s really no need for that. No, I mean it—”
“It is a small token of my goodwill. Please, do accept it.”
“Good heavens…”
Hyderlin was in the middle of debating whether to pocket it or leave it when Skalts and Sarg approached from opposite sides.
Antonic Marcelo only now noticed that a Holy Knight had been included among the search party, and his eyes lit up with sudden calculation.
“Sir Biche. What outrage is this? A Holy Knight serves not the laws of the crown but the teachings of the Order, does he not?”
Antonic began loudly declaring his intention to take the matter up with both the Order and the royal palace. He looked thoroughly emboldened. He kept looking that way, right up until Sarg spoke.
“We’ve found the children.”
Antonic Marcelo’s face went the color of ash.
Hyderlin found roughly ten boys and girls locked inside a hidden back room.
They were all asleep. Or something like sleep—it looked more as though they had been heavily intoxicated with drink or drugs. None of them appeared to have a clear mind.
Deep lacerations ran across their wrists and ankles. Basins had been placed beneath.
The blood had been drained from them while they lived.
“You raving lunatic! What in the hell were you doing with children’s blood?!”
Hyderlin struck Antonic across the back of the head. He stumbled forward and answered haltingly.
“If you bathe in the blood of a child who has not yet come of age… they say it wards off the aging of the body…”
Sarg stared at Antonic with undisguised revulsion. He could piece together the rest well enough.
The knights returned to the castle.
“Count Marcelo is dying of old age and has little time left. It appears Antonic Marcelo—the second son, pushed to the margins of the line of succession—devised this scheme to gain favor with the Count and secure as large an inheritance as possible.”
Chesa stroked his chin as he listened to Hyderlin and Sarg’s report.
“And the punishment? How does Your Majesty intend to proceed?”
Sarg asked. Chesa was quiet for a long moment. Then he opened a desk drawer and drew out a ring, which he held out toward Sarg.
“Sir Gloriosa. I can only express my gratitude for your service. Please, accept this.”
“……”
Sarg merely looked at the ring. He did not take it. Hyderlin jabbed him in the side.
“Sir. What are you waiting for?”
Sarg glanced down at his feet for a moment, then lifted his head.
“I cannot accept it.”
Hyderlin nearly cried out—what on earth are you saying—before she could stop herself. Sarg met the King’s gaze directly and asked:
“Your Majesty. Rather than offering a public commendation, you present a private possession from your own collection. What is the reason for that?”
Chesa’s eyebrow twitched, and a subtle smile settled at the corner of his mouth. It was not a smile that came from pleasure.
The King set the ring down on the desk and perched himself on the edge of it.
“Forgive me, Sir Gloriosa, but I must ask you to forget the true culprit in this matter. As far as this case is concerned, the offender is the household’s steward—a man who could not bear to watch his lord die slowly of old age and acted out of desperate devotion.”
“You intend to place the crime on another man’s shoulders?”
“Not on just anyone. The steward was an accomplice as well.”
“All who bear guilt should be held accountable. That is what is fitting.”
“Sir Gloriosa. No country in the world punishes a man for killing insects.”
Chesa spoke with considerable gentleness. But the substance of the words was sharp enough to draw blood. Sarg flinched as though he had been pricked with a needle.
“If my meaning is difficult to understand, I suggest you seek counsel from your father, Duke Gloriosa. He will enlighten you. You may go.”
“Your Majesty.”
The King made it perfectly clear that the conversation was over.
“Sir Biche. Please see Sir Gloriosa out to the castle gates.”
Hyderlin looked at Sarg. Sarg gave a quiet shake of his head.
“…Sir. It is all right.”
Sarg bowed to the King and withdrew. But the cold composure of his expression did not thaw by a single degree.
Hyderlin turned to Chesa with a face that had grown somewhat somber.
“Forgive me, Your Majesty. Sarg Gloriosa has little experience navigating politics, so his conduct can be somewhat…unrefined. I am certain he had absolutely no intention of challenging your authority.”
“You needn’t defend him. I think I understand the kind of man he is. He is every bit what I have heard. No wonder Margarite relies on him so deeply—someone like that would inspire such trust.”
Chesa smiled as he said it.
“Sir Biche. Please convey my regards to Sir Gloriosa. After all the trouble he went to, it would sit uneasily with me to send him off without a proper reward.”
“…Understood.”
Hyderlin picked up the ring from the desk and withdrew. She walked quickly, lengthening her stride until she caught up with Sarg.
“Sir Sarg. Sarg Gloriosa!”
Even when she called out loudly, Sarg ignored her and continued walking with his spine perfectly straight, not a hint of discomposure in his bearing. Hyderlin shouted.
“Hey! Sarg!”
She did not grab him by the hair as she might have done in girlhood. Hyderlin—the King’s knight, now grown—seized the Holy Knight by the shoulder and turned him around.
“Sir?”
She grabbed his wrist by force and pressed the ring into his hand.
“You absolute idiot. Take this and forget it.”
Hyderlin forced his fingers closed around it into a fist.
“To begin with, there is no legal framework to punish that man. There has not been a single case in all of Lotsa’s history where a noble was held accountable for killing commoners, and there never will be. Establishing a precedent would bring the entire nobility to revolt.”
Hyderlin closed both her hands around Sarg’s rough fist. It was the only way to keep him from throwing the King’s ring away.
“Turn a blind eye to what you see. Blend in even with things that disgust you. Swallow insults thrown in your face as though you never heard them. If you don’t, it will be you who gets hurt.”
Hyderlin gritted her teeth. That was what her own life had been.
She had been suspected of illegitimacy from the moment of her birth. The King had recognized her as a princess, but the nobility had not.
What sort of princess is born of a handmaid, and what king would acknowledge such a thing?
When she knocked down the people who said it to her face, the rumors spread immediately.
A base-born creature like that—no wonder she’s so vulgar.
Vulgar! I throw my fists to defend my mother’s honor, and I’m vulgar—while you, who speak of a mother’s shame before her own child, are somehow the noble ones?
But if you refused to meet others’ standards, you were the one who paid the price.
Hyderlin had been forced to close her eyes to what she saw, stop her ears to what she heard, and endure what was filthy and degrading.
So instead of striking people across the face, she sent dueling papers and defeated them with flawless precision. She climbed to the heights of power and ground the heel of her boot into the backs of those who had looked down at her.
That was what Hyderlin’s life had been.
That was what it meant to be worn away.
That was what it meant to be transformed.
Had she not once thrilled to the same rigid code of knighthood? Had there not been a time when she had raged at injustice and contradiction with all the brightness of a freshly sharpened blade?
There had.
But she had compromised. She had resigned herself to the shape of the world, been ground down by malice that blew through her like a cold and scouring wind, and grown rusty with the damp and rot of power exercised in the dark.
Hyderlin was no different from a rusted blade.
The world she had pierced and cut would fester like a wound infected with rot. And that corrupted world would go on to rust someone else in turn.
She kept her voice deliberately rough.
“A knight is a sword, and a sword is a tool. Tools don’t pass judgment. What you saw, what you felt—forget it!”
“……”
“Sell that ring the King gave you and buy yourself a drink to sleep on. You don’t drink? Start today. It’s a fine companion for forgetting the sins you’ve committed. I’d know.”
Everything exposed to the world would warp and change, fade and rust, be worn to nothing. So Sarg too would change one day. As she had.
And that grieved her.
“Sarg Gloriosa. Someday…you’ll come to understand all of this too.”
Hyderlin let go of the fist she had been clenching in both her hands. At that moment, Sarg reached out with his other hand and caught her wrist—lightly, carefully.
“I have no wish to understand it.”
Sarg laid the ring back into her palm.
Hyderlin felt, for just a moment, as though her heart had dropped out of her chest—though she told herself it was only a sensation.
“How does one pretend not to see what is plainly visible? How does one pretend not to hear what is clearly audible?”
“Everyone manages it.”
“That everyone manages it does not tell me whether I must manage it as well. I was taught to be honest. I was never taught to speak falsehood. If the law of the land permits a guilty man to walk freely in the sunlight, then I will find another means to see him appropriately punished.”
Sarg folded her fingers gently around the ring. Hyderlin gripped it tightly.
“Return the ring to your King.”
Sarg released her hand.
“Then I shall see you another time.”
His ash-grey eyes were alight with a color that resembled starlight.
The stars in that dark and faraway sky endure for hundreds of years, for thousands—changeless, constant.
Would he remain unchanged as well?
Sarg turned and walked away with his customary unhurried stride. In the corridor of the castle, through the narrow, tall windows, shafts of light fell across the Holy Knight’s silver hair and shattered into countless pieces.
Hyderlin stood and watched the Holy Knight walk into the light for a long, long while.
