The owner set two cups on the table. The man immediately lifted his and drank. Liquid escaped from the corner of his mouth, ran down his chin, and soaked into the rough stubble on his jaw before trickling further down his throat.
Hyderlin watched the spectacle in silence, then asked:
“Your name?”
“You said you were buying.”
“Answer my question first.”
The man’s cup hit the table with a dull thud. He had set it down almost like a throw, yet not a drop had splashed over — because the cup was already empty.
“Another.”
Hyderlin slid her own cup toward him. The man drank it halfway down before he answered.
“Sak.”
“An expensive name, that. What’s your family name?”
“Don’t have one.”
“Liar.”
“Think what you like.”
“Aren’t you going to ask my name?”
“Not curious.”
“All right, then. Just call me Jagi.”
Sak’s response was deeply disgusted.
“That’s going to make me sick.”
“Well, you’ve been drinking enough to deserve it.”
“Since you’re the one buying, I’ll give you a piece of advice.”
Sak set down his cup with a rough clatter. This time a thin wave of amber liquid sloshed over the rim.
“This place is crawling with men who are precisely as bad as you’d expect. If you want company that badly, get up right now and take your pick. If you want someone handsome, find a brothel.”
“Oh, pay for it? Sure. How much are you, then?”
Hyderlin said it coarsely. Sak’s ashen brow, jaw, and the muscles of his shoulder all seemed to twitch at once. Hyderlin watched him with perfect calm.
Go ahead, get angry. Tell me you’ve sworn your life to God. Tell me you’re a holy knight.
The corner of Sak’s mouth twitched. Then it curved — the angle of a sneer. He planted both hands on the table and swung his head forward sharply. The space between them vanished in an instant.
Hyderlin looked steadily at the face that had come to within inches of hers.
A face half-buried in lank hair and rough stubble. Eyes the color of burnt-out ash, clouded over. His breath carried the smell of cheap spirits.
Through the stench of it, something faint and cool drifted to her — a fleeting scent, clean as the breeze along a forest path, and quiet as thin starlight on a night sky.
People who had been touched by God tended to carry that kind of scent. Even without special oils or perfumes.
Perhaps it was the scent of the soul itself.
A low, cool voice spilled from between the man’s chapped lips, riding on the heat of his breath.
“Enormously expensive.”
“……”
“You couldn’t afford it.”
Hyderlin felt a sudden, disoriented jolt.
That man says something like that?
The man she remembered had been, in the most literal sense, a monk. He had woken before dawn every morning, shaved, and gone to bed on schedule every night without fail. He never touched alcohol, which meant he had no business setting foot in places like this. He knew how to be offended by a crude joke — but he had never once known how to answer one in kind.
What on earth had happened in the last four years?
Hyderlin decided to dig.
“Because you’re a knight of noble birth?”
“……”
Sak straightened up slowly. He settled back into his chair and picked up his cup again, sipping at it without expression. He showed no particular reaction — but he was clearly on guard now.
“No matter how hard someone tries to hide it, noble birth always shows through in accent and word choice. A lifetime of education, absorbed into the bones — it’s a frightening thing.”
His face tensed briefly. Hyderlin pressed on, full of confidence.
“And a trained fighter’s body and movements are entirely different from an ordinary person’s.”
“……”
“Your diction and your cadence are unmistakably aristocratic. And your build, your hands — those belong to someone trained in combat. Which makes you, in all likelihood, a knight.”
Hyderlin watched, with no small amount of enjoyment, as the muscles of Sak’s face worked and shifted. She leaned forward slightly.
“So what is a knight in his prime doing here? Did something break?”
“If you already know who I am, why are you pretending you don’t?”
Sak shot back sharply. Hyderlin smiled.
“What remarkable confidence, assuming everyone knows who you are.”
“You have the same shamelessness as Chesa.”
“That is impudent. How dare you address the king by name.”
Hyderlin reacted on instinct, pulling a face. However holy a knight he was, a king’s name was not to be thrown about like calling a dog.
Ah-hahaha.
Sak burst out laughing without warning. He threw his head back and laughed until the room seemed to shake. Hyderlin stared at him, genuinely puzzled.
The laughter slowly subsided. When it had died away entirely, he spoke in a voice so low and cold it could have made the skin crawl.
“Hey… Jagi.”
Being called that, by that voice, hit harder than Hyderlin had expected. It was an odd sensation, as though a wave had swept across every nerve she had. She suppressed the urge to scratch her arm.
“You said it yourself — noble birth shows in accent and word choice, a fighter shows in build and movement. And that applies to you too.”
“……”
“A woman who speaks and walks like that is, in all likelihood, a knight.”
Sak had been analyzing her just as she had analyzed him. Only now did Hyderlin register her own mistake.
“Ordinary people — even most nobles — don’t react so strongly to hearing the king’s name spoken aloud. That kind of aversion tends to belong to the king’s own people.”
“……”
“Like, for instance, that woman.”
Sak spoke the name with care.
“Hyderlin.”
Remarkably, his voice carried something like reverence — respect, gravity, and some other feeling she couldn’t quite name.
It was strange. Profoundly, inexplicably strange.
In all her life, Hyderlin had never once been called by that name in that way, by that man. To him, she had been the princess. And later, Sir Biche.
Never Hyderlin.
“You’re one of her people. And if that’s the case, you’d have no reason not to recognize me.”
“……”
“And I have no reason not to recognize you.”
“……”
“So we both know who the other is. How about we stop hiding our faces and our purposes?”
Sak rose abruptly from his seat. And he reached for the hood still pulled low over Hyderlin’s face.
Smack.
Hyderlin knocked his hand aside on instinct. The moment she realized what she’d done, she flinched. Sak tilted his head and looked at her.
“Hey, you—”
Crash!
Hyderlin scrambled to her feet so violently that the chair she’d been sitting on toppled over. She threw a few gallot coins onto the table and fled the tavern before she’d consciously decided to. Her heart was pounding like something caged.
She walked fast through the heavy rain, heading toward the inn where Margarite was staying.
“You’re back? When did you get in?”
Margarite rubbed her sleepy eyes and sat up. Hyderlin, who had been pulling off her soaked hood, looked at her with a troubled expression.
“I’m afraid I’ve disturbed your sleep. I apologize.”
“No… it’s all right. I never sleep well anyway.”
Margarite shifted and pushed herself upright.
“Did something happen out there? You don’t look well…”
Hyderlin thought she was beginning to understand why Margarite had avoided talking about that man. Seeing such a once-noble holy knight reduced to that state was the kind of thing you’d rather not call to mind. There was no reason to pile more weariness onto an already exhausted woman. Hyderlin made vague, deflecting noises.
“It’s nothing. The weather is bad and I worry about the roads. We ought to stay here until it clears. Please go back to sleep.”
Margarite nodded and lay back down. Hyderlin tucked the blanket up to her chin, then settled herself in the chair by the window.
Lights wavered beyond the curtain of rain. The taverns would stay lit until dawn, and the drinkers would stay in them until dawn, too.
And that man would be submerged in alcohol until dawn as well.
Why did I do that?
Hyderlin pressed a hand to her still-fluttering chest.
Even if she showed him her face, the man would not believe she was Hyderlin. He would simply think she bore an uncanny resemblance to Hyderlin. And if she actually claimed to be Hyderlin, he would dismiss it as a cruel joke. The Hyderlin who died four years ago could not be walking the earth — everyone knew that.
So it had been an irrational thing to do.
Damn. It was my neck that got cut, not my brain. Hyderlin Biche must be getting rusty.
Hyderlin laughed a little, the sound halfway to a sigh.
Rusty, yes — discarded by a king, at that…
Her shoulders shook with quiet laughter for a while. Then it faded.
“Like, for instance, that woman. Hyderlin.”
So if she had to give it a reason — it was that she’d been startled. Hyderlin had never once been called by her own name in that tone of voice, by that man, in her entire life.
The truth was that somewhere along the way, no one had called her by that name that way at all. People tended to say:
“Princess.”
Or:
“Sir Biche.”
Sarg had been no different.
“You’re welcome to call me Hyderlin, or just Hys.”
She had offered, generously, more than once. But Sarg had steadfastly continued to call her Sir Biche. Hyderlin hadn’t taken it personally. Sarg called everyone that way.
Everyone except Margarite.
He had always said her name with warmth — “Margarite.” And once, on a particular occasion:
“Mac.”
Just like that.
“You can say something like that too? You must think a great deal of the saint.”
This had been before things between them had deteriorated beyond repair. Hyderlin had found it curious that even the rigid Sarg called the saint by a nickname. Sarg had glanced at her and replied without any particular inflection:
“You’re the same, Sir Biche.”
“Pardon?”
“Chesa.”
“Do not address His Majesty by name.”
“Are you aware of how you use that name yourself?”
“Am I the same as you?”
“…You’re worse, Sir Biche.”
Sarg had thrown the reply out bluntly and walked away from Margarite’s side. Hyderlin had watched his retreating back and murmured.
“What a fool. As if you and I are the same. He is my brother and he is my king. But the holy saint is not only someone you protect and serve.”
Hyderlin had kicked a pebble for no particular reason.
“She is the most precious person in the world.”
That rich dark-brown hair. The pearl-pale complexion. A smile as full and beautiful as a magnolia in bloom, and a character — bright, warm, utterly unclouded.
She was a saint, carrying God’s guidance and dispensing goodness to the world.
It would have been impossible not to love a woman made of that much sunlight. Even Chesa had kept finding his eyes drawn back to her.
Sarg must have been no different.
Hyderlin had raised her eyes to the sky. The air had been fresh that day, the wind clean and cool. Good weather for a walk, or for sword practice. Probably good weather for carrying out the king’s orders, too.
That night, Hyderlin had been tasked with exterminating an entire household.
She was the Captain of the Royal Guard — she was the one who wielded the blade at the king’s command.
Every person had their role, and it was right to understand one’s place within it. Hyderlin had made a habit of accepting what she could not have, letting go of it, and forgetting it.
After that day, she had stopped offering, even in jest, to let Sarg call her Hyderlin or Hys.
She was always Sir Biche.
The Captain of the Royal Guard. That woman who would commit any act the king required of her.
Everyone had called Hyderlin that name with a mixture of awe and fear.
And Hyderlin had been satisfied with that. She had been — she was sure of it.
“Hyderlin.”
Then why did her chest feel this loud?
The lights in the taverns still burned. They would burn all through the night, and that man would spend all of it drowning in drink. And Hyderlin would spend all of it unable to sleep.
“What a miserable state of affairs.”
At this rate, she was going to spend the entire night thinking about him. Better to redirect the current of her thoughts. Hyderlin rummaged through her mind and pulled out the matter most urgently at hand.
Margarite’s wish.
Taking a life was Hyderlin’s specialty — but when the target was someone of high standing, things became considerably more complicated.
And this was the king.
Assassinating a king, protected by countless layers of guards and courtiers, would be no easy task even for Hyderlin.
But she had always succeeded at difficult things. This time would be no different.
Hyderlin laced her fingers behind her neck and stared at the ceiling.
And so she spent the rest of the night turning over, from every angle, the question of how to keep her promise to the saint.
