Not even the Jomon Sugi tree (Estimated age: 7,000 years) could compete with him!
I need to do better too!
“I also longed to see you, brother. There’s so much I want to tell you about!”
“And I could listen to your beautiful voice forever, my heavenly bird.”
Just like that, Alexei escorted me into our residence.
Aboard the second carriage that had left the detached palace sat Lydia Selesnoa. Her head was hanging low as she tried her hardest to focus.
She had to figure out how to report what had happened today to her father, but a myriad of other thoughts kept interrupting her—thoughts of the former empress, thoughts of Olga Florus...and thoughts of Ekaterina Yulnova.
Lydia had kept her eyes on her since the day of the entrance ceremony. The three grand ducal houses were the adversaries of the House of Selesnoa, and Ekaterina was the daughter of one of these esteemed houses. The influence Lydia should have wielded in the academy as a relative of the former empress had been stolen from her hands, there and then, by the granddaughter of Sergei Yulnova.
Lydia’s parents often asked her for information on Ekaterina and always reminded Lydia that she could not afford to lose to her in any way.
Her first impression of Ekaterina during the entrance ceremony had been that she was a great beauty. She was the picture of elegance, yet she also had the sort of voluptuous figure that attracted the eyes of men. That had annoyed Lydia to no end. However, she knew that the prince wasn’t the kind of man who was easily swayed by such things. He was smart, and he would pick an equally smart partner to help him rule.
“If I receive an invitation to the garden of the God of Music and earn his divine protection, he’ll see my value and take my hand. All I have to do is keep on practicing, just as I have been,” Lydia often told herself to calm her nerves. But despite what she’d tried to believe, Mikhail and Ekaterina had gotten close incredibly quickly.
Ekaterina hadn’t made her debut in high society, which meant she lacked the experience necessary to partner with the prince. Lydia and her parents had been convinced that she’d quickly try to put together a grand party to flaunt her arrival in the capital and keep the other ladies in check. Her mother had planned her counterattack and prepared to thwart Ekaterina’s plans, but Ekaterina had done no such thing. Not only had she not made her debut, but the company she kept at the academy was subpar to say the least. She’d made friends with the daughter of a baron in name only—an actual commoner—and she didn’t approach anyone worthy of her rank.
From that point onward, Lydia started suspecting that there had been something truly wrong with Ekaterina’s upbringing. Did she not know how to behave in society? It appeared she hadn’t received much of an education.
Rumors spread, and the ladies of the capital had started snickering about the young lady of the House of Yulnova despite never having met her in person.
As if to deny these rumors, Ekaterina Yulnova had taken first place on the first examination in her year, beating the prince himself to get that result. Given the way people had looked at her so far, it’d come as such a surprise that she’d become a hot topic of conversation in high society.
The next thing that’d sparked the interest of the ladies of the capital had been the imperial visit to the residence of the Yulnovas. The reason? The Empress Magdalena had ordered a dress using the new dye of the Yulnovas, Celestial Blue.
Magdalena was a fashion icon. She’d popularized intricate silks from beyond the Summit of the Gods, and her outfits were always the center of attention whenever she appeared in public. She practically dictated the trends of the capital. Needless to say, the empress was well aware of that fact, and she never wore anything that didn’t fit her personal sense of style, no matter how much anyone tried to pitch it to her.
If Ekaterina had managed to catch the empress’s expert eye, she must have worn a magnificent dress during the imperial visit. The ladies of the capital had been dying to know what it’d looked like. On top of that, Celestial Blue was a gorgeous, versatile dye, so it had quickly grown popular—much like Ekaterina did at the academy.
Ekaterina’s standing had begun to change after she helped fight off the monster that’d attacked. Her classmates had been keeping her at arm’s length at the start of the school year, but they’d started getting closer to her from that moment.
They’d assumed Ekaterina was haughty, but then they realized that she was actually a cheerful girl. She didn’t change her behavior based on the rank of her conversation partner and was easy to talk to. People started commending her for these traits, and she became especially popular among the lower-class nobles.
That was when Ekaterina had organized a social event for the first time. She’d invited her classmates—all of them, regardless of rank—to the very rose garden the imperial family had visited and put together a garden party.
With that, Lydia had thought she was finally seeing through her rival. Ekaterina had realized that she’d gotten a late start with the important nobles, so she was planning to gather the support of as many lower-class nobles as she could. The natural structure of society was such that there were few high-ranking nobles, so most of the students of the academy were the sons and daughters of low-ranking families. Ekaterina’s stance seemed to have been that there was strength in numbers.
She truly was Sergei’s granddaughter. She made light of status and seemed to have inherited his dangerous thoughts. Lydia, on the other hand, shared her parents’ beliefs: Sergei’s ideology was everything the Selesnoa Marquessate stood against.
Ekaterina’s offensive hadn’t stopped there. She’d gifted the emperor glass pens, and he’d proceeded to use one to sign a treaty with a neighboring nation. The Minister for Foreign Affairs of that country had been captivated by the novel pen, and word of its beauty had spread. It hadn’t taken long for most influential nobles and rich businessmen to start seeking the pens.
In the midst of this agitation, Lydia had learned that Mikhail was to summer in the Yulnova Duchy.
It was clear that this was the imperial family’s way of showing support to Alexei, who’d recently inherited his duchy at the young age of seventeen. The emperor saw Alexei as a promising asset fit to support his son when he took the throne. If Alexei became a relative of the future emperor through his sister, he’d find himself in the same position as his late grandfather, Sergei—a close, influential advisor to the emperor, with an unshakable status. While the emperor had yet to go that far, many saw it this way already. In their eyes, Ekaterina Yulnova was the prime candidate for empress.