Chapter 57
“What do you mean, that man?”
It would have been better if Mary had been a little less encouraging, or if Ron had been a little less excited.
When Mary asked with her eyes wide open, Ron answered as if he had been waiting for the question.
“I mean him! The man everyone in Dempis is talking about—the prospective son-in-law of the House of Count Ix!”
“……!”
“There are endless rumors that he’s the Crown Prince of Deisnoia or a tycoon wealthy enough to buy the entire continent, but I know better. That fellow is just one of the fifty stallions Miss Evanshire collected back when she was in the capital! Crown Prince, my foot… He’s nothing but a pretty face….”
“Wait a moment. A pretty face? Have you actually seen his face in person?”
When Mary asked urgently, Ron nodded. Not only did he nod, but he even went so far as to describe the man’s appearance in meticulous detail.
Mary, who had been focused on Ron’s story out of curiosity, began to feel a strange sense of dissonance at some point. Something was on the verge of surfacing in her mind.
“Wait a second, Mr. Garnet. Please stay right here for a moment.”
Mary hurried off somewhere and returned a short while later with a young girl. It was the same girl who had shown her friends the special commemorative coin engraved with the Deposed Prince’s face a few days ago.
When Mary nudged the girl’s side, she reluctantly pulled out the coin. Mary asked cautiously.
“By any chance… did he look like this?”
“Hmm…. Well, I can’t say it’s exactly the same, but it’s remarkably similar. Especially the eyes and the bridge of the nose… they’re so identical you’d believe they were brothers….”
Ron stopped mid-sentence and snatched the coin to peer at it right in front of his eyes. The girl screamed and snatched it back, but the dazed expression on Ron’s face did not fade.
“What is it, Mr. Garnet? Is there a problem?”
“No, it’s not that there’s a problem, but….”
Hurriedly fixing his expression, Ron asked Mary.
“By the way, what is this coin? And who is the person engraved on it?”
“It’s a special coin minted for the Late King’s coronation ceremony. The face engraved here is His Highness the Crown Prince. ……Though he isn’t the Crown Prince anymore.”
It was the girl, the owner of the coin, who answered. Ron’s mouth fell open stupidly. However, no voice came out.
The thought that had just crossed his mind was, even to him, far too nonsensical.
“There are numerous testimonies of sightings of the Deposed Prince centered around Northwestern Matila, Your Majesty.”
When the Queen’s aide, Frostis, delivered the report, Queen Catherine was practicing her marksmanship in an open clearing within the palace grounds.
“There are claims that the missing Deposed Prince crossed the strait with his bare hands, or that the dead prince has become a ghost and is wandering about. Most of it is nothing more than groundless rumors, but there was one report that caught my attention.”
“What is it?”
The Queen asked lowly before aiming her barrel at the target. Frostis lowered his voice as he replied.
“A man resembling the Deposed Prince was spotted in Dempis, and it is said that he is soon to marry the only daughter of the House of Count Ix.”
A bird took flight from the thicket. Bang!
A moment later, a servant ran toward the Queen with the prey. A small bird was bleeding and convulsing in its final throes. The Queen merely looked at it with a dry gaze and said nothing.
Observing the Queen with a puzzled air, Frostis asked cautiously.
“Shall I order men to be sent to Dempis to investigate?”
“Sending people over a single rumor of unclear origin? The royal dignity would certainly be well-preserved then.”
“I-I apologize.”
“Take it away.”
The Queen coldly ordered the servant holding the prey, handed over her rifle, and turned away. Frostis quickly followed behind the Queen as she returned to the palace.
“What of Tom Philson’s whereabouts?”
“Yes. About that…. We confirmed that he crossed into Trie, but his tracks have been lost since then. I expect the pursuit will take more time….”
As if there was no need to hear more, the Queen increased her pace. The servants, including Frostis, followed behind her in a scramble.
That night.
“She remained resolute even after hearing the report that the Deposed Prince might be alive. She was far too composed.”
In the study of the Frostis estate, Frostis spoke while loosening his tie.
As if it wasn’t just the tie that was suffocating him, his tone was incomparably more agitated than when he was with the Queen.
“Is it because Her Majesty’s nature is so cold and heartless? No. To me, it seemed as if the very existence of the Deposed Prince had been completely erased from Her Majesty’s mind. As if whether he is dead or alive is of absolutely no concern to her.”
“Perhaps it is the opposite.”
There was one more person in the study. It was Delinda, dressed elegantly in an evening gown as if she had just returned from an outing.
“It might not be that Her Majesty has no interest in the Deposed Prince’s life or death, but rather that she is in a situation where she can do nothing even if she knows.”
When Delinda spoke calmly from the sofa, Frostis, who was about to unbutton his cuffs, let out a hollow laugh at his daughter’s deduction as if it were absurd.
“Her Majesty is being driven as the prime suspect in the assassination of the Deposed Prince; what kind of situation could possibly silence her? I cannot even begin to fathom it.”
“Every person has their own private circumstances. Would Her Majesty be any exception?”
“I would sooner bet that the Deposed Prince is dead for certain. Her Majesty likely dismissed the talk of him being alive and trying to become a live-in son-in-law of some noble house as nonsense not worth listening to.”
“Is that so…?” Delinda’s face as she answered was devoid of anything that could be called an expression.
Frostis, who had been standing by the desk, moved to the seat opposite Delinda. He leaned toward her with an excited expression.
“Enough of that, let’s hear about you. Well, was there any progress today in winning the heart of His Highness the Crown Prince?”
Delinda was an attending maid who enjoyed the favor of Princess Sylvia, but in reality, her and her family’s goal was far from faithfully serving a member of the royal family.
Delinda, who had inherited the noble impression of the Frostis family along with their navy-blue hair, stared intently at her father with her uniquely striking, alluring eyes. Those eyes, as black as obsidian, were the only useful legacy she had inherited from her biological mother.
“The Crown Prince has completely lost his mind. Ever since the staged assassination attempt ended in failure and his accomplice, Tom Philson, disappeared.”
Delinda’s voice was so clear and melodious that her mockery and contempt for the Crown Prince were hard to detect at first listen.
“As you know, Father, the Crown Prince is currently holed up in Danger Palace, except for the bare minimum of official functions. Far from meeting anyone, they say he is trembling like a coward, fearing that Tom Philson might appear at any moment and expose his crimes.”
“Do not be so displeased, Linda.”
Frostis soothed his daughter, using her pet name.
“Men are creatures that are as strong as diamonds and as soft as graphite at the same time. Now that His Highness has hit rock bottom and his heart has softened like graphite, if you can just penetrate it, he will easily become yours.”
Frostis smiled as tenderly as any other father.
However, Delinda did not smile back. She knew well that her father’s smile was a mask that brilliantly erased the repulsion of using his own daughter as a tool.
“It would have been nice if that woman who gave birth to me had also passed down the skill of seducing men at will.”
The muscles in Frostis’s face twitched. Delinda feigned ignorance and continued, her lips curling slightly.
“But there is something bothering me, Father.”
“What is bothering you?”
“The daughter of the House of Count Ix.”
It was a fact widely known among the capital’s nobility that the Crown Prince once had his eye on the only daughter of Count Ix.
Though it had been briefly buried by the Crown Prince’s assassination incident, people’s suspicions regarding that matter were beginning to crawl back to the surface.
Why did the Crown Prince, who should have acted with more political calculation than anyone, choose that woman out of all the many bridal candidates? The daughter of a family that would provide nothing but a pittance of help for a stable succession to the throne?
“Some chatter that the hot-blooded Crown Prince forgot his duty and fell into a fiery love, but my thoughts are different. The Crown Prince’s choice was a thoroughly calculated strategy from the beginning.”
“The benefits the Crown Prince could gain by marrying into the House of Count Ix….”
Frostis pretended to listen to his daughter’s opinion, but in truth, he thought it was a nonsensical delusion, much like her previous guess.
The reputation of being the ‘Shield of Northern Matila’ was a thing of the past; what could the owner of a rural territory that was declining day by day possibly give to a Crown Prince suffering from legitimacy issues?
‘Wait a moment.’
Something suddenly flashed through his mind. It was the troubling report he had personally delivered to the Queen today.
“Come to think of it, in the report that the Deposed Prince might be alive… the name of the House of Count Ix was there. That was the very family the Deposed Prince was said to be entering as a son-in-law.”
“…….”
“Is it a coincidence?”
If one were to assume for a moment that the rumor was true, why would the Deposed Prince choose the House of Count Ix as his place of refuge out of all the many families? Simply because he had an acquaintance with that daughter during this year’s spring social season?
While Frostis remained uncertain, his eyes met Delinda’s. She was merely looking at her father with her hands demurely folded.
“First, I will keep an eye on the movements of the royal family, so in the meantime, you do your job.”
“Yes, Father.”
As she answered, Delinda finally smiled for the first time. It was an innocent yet enchanting smile, looking exactly like the biological mother Frostis remembered.
Lottie had just returned from afternoon tea with her friends when she heard that her father had been urgently summoned to the palace.
She had once again been hounded by her friends regarding her fiancé’s identity, and Coleman informed her of her father’s news with a worried face, speaking tentatively.
“I wonder if the Master was summoned because of ‘that matter.’”
“What do you mean by that matter?”
“I mean… the issue of your fiancé, Milady.”
It was a question of whether Kayan Stallion’s true identity had been discovered and if her father had gone to be reprimanded for it.
Lottie almost blurted out the thought that instantly came to mind but quickly swallowed her words. This was because she was still supposed to be unaware of Calyx’s true identity.
Lottie joked, asking if the busy Queen would have summoned her father just to congratulate them on a marriage within a single family, and added her own guess that it was likely because Princess Sylvia’s engagement ceremony was approaching.
When she then blinked her eyes with a look that said she knew nothing, Coleman left the room with a suspicious face.
‘Could it be that the things Ron Garnet is blabbering about have reached the Queen’s ears?’
Climbing the stairs, Lottie recalled how her friends had interrogated her.
She had managed to give vague answers when they shoved the special coin at her and asked if her fiancé really looked like that, but Ron Garnet was different.
He had seen Calyx’s face in person, and he might try to win the favor of the capital’s nobility by spreading that fact everywhere.
Of course, she didn’t think the capital’s nobles or the Queen would take the word of someone from a humble family at face value… but what if things went wrong and the fact that he was alive was discovered?
“Milady.”
Walter Hanson, the family’s shadow, approached Lottie as she was walking down the hallway. As he bowed and tried to pass by, Lottie called out to him.
“Hanson. That man, Tom Philson—how is he doing?”
