“How long has it been since I last saw you, Eve?!”
That was the very first thing Kieman said when he arrived at the Karlan council with Matthias and saw Eve.
“Do you need lumber that badly? Well, goodness me! Kerube has so much high-quality lumber from Lenos!”
Lawrence hung his head, as though trying to endure a headache in response to Kieman’s enthusiasm, but Holo was enjoying herself.
Eve, of course, did not outwardly show her surprise, but she glanced at Lawrence as he hung in the back, her sharp gaze asking him what the meaning of all this was.
Lawrence, putting on the performance of his lifetime, simply shrugged, acting as a victim who just so happened to get swept up in it all.
“You would not believe what happened when I went to Lord Matthias to discuss his debt. He said he simply could not stand the thought of his precious trees getting cut down, and he even had quite an argument with Lawrence! Lawrence, too, has interests in the Salonia wheat fields, so he, too, was quite upset about losing the forest. I simply could not ignore this problem! I thought long and hard about this!”
Kieman rambled on and on as though it were the truth, and Matthias stood beside him, silent.
Matthias had deliberately run some oil through his mustache to make it stand a bit on end, and he wore a rustic coat made from bear pelt.
He decided it would be much more effective to play the part of a stubborn lord, trying to keep his anger in check, who had come face-to-face with a woman he did not trust, instead of ranting endlessly about things that he was not familiar with.
“And once we collected the information—what do you know!” Kieman clapped his hands and grinned, bearing his canines. “It turned out you’d be making quite a profit out of this arrangement.”
It was Kieman’s idea to barge in on the Karlan council uninvited; they did not even let the city authorities know ahead of time.
He and Matthias decided that made it obvious that the plan came from a brazen representative from Kerube and a landowning noble who did not understand the subtleties of polite society. They would think it was unlikely the idea came from the former traveling merchant who stood quietly in the corner.
Of course, the Karlan authorities who did not know what was going on behind the scenes were clearly reeling and confounded by this development, worried that their entire project would soon be nothing but foam on the sea.
“And that is when my humble self thought, as a member of the Kerube City Council, why not link arms with Karlan by virtue of trade?!”
Eve was not the only one who exclaimed in surprise—those from Karlan did, too.
“Kerube is three, four times the size of this city and maybe even more, but we cannot trade in everything. And that is why I’ve decided to come to Karlan today. You venture in search for new horizons, so I am here to propose a product that would be perfect for you!”
✦ ✦ ✦
