After leaving the fruit stand, the young man vanished into the crowd and inconspicuously and silently disappeared into an alley. If anyone had been watching him closely, they might have felt a strange sensation that his movements were too natural. Alas, no one was paying attention to this particular man in the crowd.
Once in the alley, he tossed the fruit he had just purchased to a street orphan curled up on the ground. The child looked up to thank the man but instead let out a small cry and ran the other way. The young man’s expression had changed from the gentle, kind one he had shown Louise to an ice-cold facade of barely-contained wrath.
Something’s wrong.
The young man, the underground agent-for-fire whom Herscherik had called Kuro, recalled the events that took place in the castle after he infiltrated it the previous night. The castle—the royal quarters in particular—was strangely busy. Kuro had not met Herscherik nor completed his task that night because of the heavy traffic of knights and guards tromping through the halls. There was only one plausible theory Kuro could devise from the previous night’s commotion at the castle and Herscherik’s absence from the fruit stand he had been frequenting in secret.
With a scowl on his face, Kuro made his way to see the Oracle, an infamous information broker of the underground. The Oracle charged more than most others in the business, but anyone who lived in the shadows knew that this broker provided information worthy of the price.
As he hastened through the alleys, Kuro couldn’t stop picturing the smile on that blond-haired prince who was always full of surprises. At each of their encounters, Herscherik had shown expressions unbecoming of his age and acted unbecoming of his royal status. Before Kuro knew it, all of his dangerous infiltration missions into the castle had become nothing more than an excuse to see the prince. Kuro used to only view his work as a means to earn money and nobles only as despicable but lucrative prey. He had come face-to-face with the darkness that lurked within the shadows of aristocracy, as most agents of the underground did. That darkness, with its shadowy specter of greed, tempted people into forsaking their humanity.
But when Kuro first met Herscherik, he couldn’t sense a shred of that darkness within the prince. Kuro felt strangely comfortable beside him and never enjoyed leaving him. Whenever Herscherik asked him a question or a favor, Kuro couldn’t refuse. Before long, the bewilderment Kuro felt over Herscherik and some other emotion that he had never felt before had turned to a comfortable kind of exhilaration. If teaching Herscherik the gap in the barrier had caused the prince’s disappearance somehow, Kuro would never forgive himself for it. His steps hastened one after another, until he was sprinting through the alleyways like a gust of wind. The only thing he longed for now was to see Herscherik smile.
Herscherik was dreaming that he was floating inside a cloud. He felt a distant nagging sensation at the back of his mind, but even that got lost in the fluff. He could not even be bothered to figure out if the fluffiness felt comfortable or revolting.
Whatever. I could float around like this forever... Just as sloth began to overcome him, Herscherik snapped awake from hearing a yelling man and a crying woman.
He was awake but could only see darkness. Herscherik realized that his eyes were closed and tried to open them wide, but he only managed to open them enough to see a blurry crack of light. Sensing he must be in danger, he tried to move his body, which felt exceedingly heavy and disobedient. Worst of all was his headache. Herscherik gave up on moving and focused on assessing his current situation with his still-foggy consciousness. With much effort, he discerned that he wasn’t in his own room from the fact that the bed he was on was much inferior in quality to his own.
Did someone... drug me? With sleeping pills?
Herscherik made a guess to explain the unusual state of his body. There was a time when Ryoko’s job search had entered a vicious cycle. Her failed attempts had made her anxious about the future and left her unable to sleep at night. The insomnia wrecked her physical well-being, leading to more failed interviews. At some point, her parents had urged Ryoko to see a psychiatrist. There, she was prescribed some sleeping pills. However, just describing her anxiety to the psychiatrist, after being too scared to open up to her parents, had significantly eased Ryoko’s mind. She had been too intimidated to actually take the pills. In fact, once she had switched her mindset and was no longer afraid of rejection, her job search didn’t last for much longer before she landed the office job she’d held until her death.
The side effects of the sleeping pills, as the pharmacist had described to Ryoko, matched Herscherik’s current state: dizziness, lethargy, and headaches. His thought process was being heavily impeded by these symptoms.
Who drugs a four-year-old? With an internal grumble, Herscherik attempted to retrace his memory through the haze of his headache.
As the sun was going down, he had returned from the fruit stand to his room via his usual route without anyone spotting him. He had been carrying a book he had checked out of the library beforehand, just to solidify his alibi. Then, he lounged on his sofa by the window, reading to pass the time until supper. Just as he began to contemplate which location he would infiltrate for that night’s episode of his investigative journalism program, Meria had finished preparing his supper. Herscherik remembered eating it.
The sautéed chicken was delicious. The pumpkin-ish soup, too.
The royal head chef prepared exquisite dishes, day after day. Both in this life and his previous one, Herscherik loved good food. Ryoko, however, never considered herself handy in the kitchen and specialized in eating more than cooking.