“All right, does everyone have their bowls ready? Let’s start picking ingredients.”
We were just about to build our seafood rice bowls using the haul Namitaro brought back, and the selection round was underway. The first ingredient everyone wanted was tuna.
“I figured that would be the top pick. Time to play rock, paper, scissors. But actually, Leni goes first since she chose something else.”
“Thanks!”
Leni had picked raw whitebait for her first ingredient. She said she had chosen it because she’d never tried it before, but I thought that was a pretty high bar for a beginner.
“Um, right. Anyway, the rule is one scoop per turn, and I’ve got to lift the spoon completely before transferring it to the bowl, right? Well, here goes!” After double-checking the rules, Leni carefully dipped her spoon into the whitebait and quickly tried to transfer the fish to her bowl.
“It’s not as easy as it looks, huh?”
She wasn’t able to get much. Raw whitebait wasn’t really the type of ingredient you could scoop in big chunks anyway. Maybe next time I should set different scoop limits depending on the ingredient.
“All right, now it’s our turn!”
Kriss led the charge and kicked off the rock, paper, scissors tournament for the minced tuna.
“I get first pick!” Aura cheered.
“I’m second!” Amur said.
“I guess I’m third,” I said.
“This time for sure, I’ll...”
“Pfft, ah ha ha!”
Aura and Amur both went in for a big haul and tried to scoop from the very bottom of the center of the mound. They both failed miserably, barely getting anything in their bowls.
“I’ll go for this spot, then... Not bad.”
I put my spoon into the gap they’d opened up and got a pretty decent scoop. Kriss and Jeanne watched closely then copied my approach. They both managed to get almost ten times as much fish as Aura and Amur had. Not that ten times was a lot since Aura and Amur had barely gotten any. Even though Prince Lyle messed up a bit, he still ended up with about three or four times more than Aura and Amur had gotten.
“All right, let’s eat!”
Once everyone had finished loading up their bowls, we all dug in at the same time.
“I’m ready for seconds!”
“Me too!”
Amur and Prince Lyle were the first to finish and were already diving into round two.
“Damn, I’m falling behind!”
“Hey, you two! Don’t take everything!”
Kriss and Gramps weren’t far behind. They’d cleaned their bowls and gone for seconds to keep the pace.
“I...mmph!” Aura tried too hard to catch up and ended up choking.
“Here, drink this.” Jeanne quickly handed her a glass of water.
Lunch was loud and chaotic, but once everyone had eaten their fill and started relaxing, I noticed Prince Lyle heading off to the restroom. I got up and quietly followed him.
“Hey, Prince Lyle? There’s something I want to ask you.”
“What is it?”
I waited for him to come out of the bathroom and then led him to my room. Once we were inside, I locked the door. Prince Lyle gave me a suspicious look, but then he relaxed and sat down in a nearby chair.
“What’s so serious that you have to lock the door?”
“You know when you walked Angela out earlier? I heard you mutter, ‘I have a bad feeling about this.’”
He looked a little surprised that I had heard that. Then, he let out a long sigh. “I didn’t think I said that out loud...”
“It was really quiet, so don’t worry, no one else heard you.” I then explained to him that I had just happened to be standing close enough to overhear.
Lyle frowned slightly but soon got serious. “Well, since you did, there’s no helping it. It’s nothing definite and it’s just my guess, but...to put it simply, when I saw Angela, it made me think there might be a chance that the royalists will split.”
“The royalist faction, splitting up? You mean Angela might start her own faction?”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t think she has any interest in that. I think if anyone is to start a new faction, it would be Duke Sanga.”
There were several noble factions in our kingdom, but the big three were the royalists, the reformists, and the neutral factions. In terms of numbers, all the others combined didn’t even come close to the smallest of those three.
“And even within those major factions, there are sub-factions. You’ve got the central group led by my father in the royalists, the northern bloc, the western bloc, and so on,” Prince Lyle explained.
The king’s bloc consisted of people like Lyle himself, Duke Sanga, Marquis Sammons, and Margrave Haust.
“But lately, there’s been one noble in the royalist faction who’s been gaining a lot of influence...”
“Duke Sanga?” I asked.
“Yep. On top of his own standing, three of his children have married into powerful noble families. In addition to that, the adopted daughter of Albert’s fiancée’s family is now engaged to the prince, who will one day be king. That alone puts the duke’s bloodline dangerously close to the throne. If things play out right, someone from the Sanga family could end up as a monarch one day. They might even try to replace the existing royal family.” Then, he quickly added, “Now, I don’t think Duke Sanga or Albert have those kinds of ambitions, but who knows about the next generation? People change, and lofty goals can pop out of nowhere.”
I understood Prince Lyle’s concerns, but that kind of speculation wasn’t exactly new either. It also didn’t quite explain why seeing Angela made him blurt that out. I told him as much.
He mulled it over for a bit. “Tenma, when you heard she was coming, what did you think the visit would be about?” he asked.
“Huh? Well, I figured she’d be trying to marry Primera off to me.”
He nodded. “Exactly. And that’s what every other noble will think when they hear about her visit too. That means that some of them will start assuming that Duke Sanga is using his daughter to pull the Dragonslayer, the strongest adventurer in the kingdom, into his faction. Considering your popularity among the capital’s citizens, Duke Sanga would gain power, military strength, and public support if you joined his camp. He’d have enough of a foundation to build his own kingdom, if he wanted to.”
That sounded like a stretch, but maybe it wasn’t so impossible.
“Even if Duke Sanga isn’t aiming for that, the possibility of it happening might make other nobles act out on their own—especially the reformists. They’re already straggling behind the royalists, so stirring up tension or planting doubts in people’s minds could be a way to tip the balance.”
And even if they couldn’t create a real rift, just causing people to be suspicious of the duke could weaken the royalists’ bloc.
“Well, stuff like this tends to flare up whenever noble marriages are involved,” the prince said. “It’s not all that unusual, really. The same thing happened during Angela’s wedding and Albert’s engagement. Still, it’s a pain to have to deal with it every time.”
“Wait, so when she said she had other places to visit...” I began.
“Yeah, she’s definitely out taking preventative measures.”
Sheesh. Being part of the ducal family sounded like nothing but trouble. That reminded me about how I had signed books for Rachael’s kids. I asked Prince Lyle whether I should just give them to the duke or hand them over at a party.