“With all due respect, Your Highness. I have suggested this several times, but perhaps it is about time that you deliver the letters to Her Highness personally?” Alto asked from behind Claudio. He took the new letter from Volland from the white hawk perched in the open window of the royal office. The question made Claudio tighten his brows.
‘He is right. You can use me, but if this things keep up like this, the Volland princess will never come out. You won’t be able to test many ways to return your mana to normal. Claudio, you’re being spineless.’
“...Master Edel, I’m going to have the chef fricassee your familiar.” Claudio glared at the talking white hawk, Edeltraud’s familiar. The hawk jumped hurriedly from the windowsill and crumbled out of existence like melting snow.
“This is Mage Edeltraud’s suggestion as well. I have been told that Her Highness has come out from being cooped up in her bedroom to receive the letters. So I believe that you meeting her face-to-face is in order...”
“I’m busy. You deliver it for me.” Flat out denying the suggestion, Claudio pushed the letter over to Alto. On any other day, Alto would have left the room on that. Today, though, he did not take his leave.
“Each time I go to deliver these, I end up receiving some rather biting questions from Her Highness’s maid. Such as, ‘Does His Highness really intend on apologizing?’”
“I do, which is why I’m having letters from her family in Volland being delivered every day. —If that is how this is being perceived, then delivering these is a waste of time. You have training scheduled now, don’t you? I’m sorry for the constant source of trouble.”
Alto threw the letter on the desk in frustration. While he still had it in him to argue his point, he simply lowered his eyebrows, saluted, and left the office.
The room became so quiet you could hear a pin drop. Claudio sat in his chair and breathed a sigh in grand fashion.
How many days had it been since Rosemarie stopped coming out of her room? He hadn’t been able to sleep, and it was hard to breathe. His health was going downhill. Things had been going well for a while, which made the strain on his body feel especially bad.
(Yeah, I sure am busy, all right. I just don’t want to meet her face-to-face. I’m the pathetic one here.)
He was the one who had abandoned her on the day of the Imperial Bout, shaking her hand away in rage as she held on for support. Now that he was thinking with a level head, it didn’t matter how much of a grudge he had. What he did, he realized now, was inexcusable.
The image of Rosemarie’s face frozen in despair flickered in his mind; meeting her eyes was awkward.
He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling with a hand over one eye, propping his feet on his desk in a flagrant display of poor manners. His throbbing headache was beating against the back of his eyes. Under his hand, he felt a detestable pelt of soft, smooth fur.
—I can see your face as human. You also have the proper texture of human skin. Prince, you are no beast.
Her straightforward and concerned gaze and words caused him to feel a small iota of joy, and it was giving him very mixed feelings. In an outburst of anger, he ended up replying to her by saying that he wasn’t asking for an apology and whatnot.
And when he thought back, he realized Rosemarie asked about his condition at every single opportunity.
(She did the same at the evening gala for selecting my bride.)
Even though she didn’t have the best complexion in the world herself, she had only been concerned about Claudio. The only girl who had ever shown concern for him, and did so while neither averting her eyes nor being afraid, was Rosemarie.
(Speaking of not averting her eyes... She acted odd after I talked to her about her role in the Imperial Bout...)
She was afraid to participate in the Imperial Bout at first, but she suddenly found the motivation to take up the role for whatever reason. However, in a rare occasion, she did so without looking at Claudio, which is why he remembered. Perhaps he had said something that stimulated a change in her mindset. He had been so fed up with Rosemarie and her scaredy-cat ways that he couldn’t even remember what he’d said, but the moment stuck in the corner of his mind.
—Personally, I wouldn’t find the fact that you can instantly identify people who harbor animosity cumbersome at all; in fact, I’m envious.
He lifted himself up with a gasp. The momentum caused the chair he had been leaning in to slide, and he toppled over to the floor.
“...Blast it all.” Claudio clasped a hand over the spot on his head where it had hit the floor. As if cued by the sound of the chair toppling over, the knight on duty outside the door rushed in.
“Did something happen, sir?!”
“It was nothing. Just tried to pick up a document off the floor and ended up tripping.” Claudio stood up, picking up the documents that just so happened to be on the floor in front of him, playing things off as if nothing transpired. As soon as the relieved knight disappeared past the door, Claudio sat back down in his repositioned chair, ignored the throbbing spot on the back of his head, and leaned his entire arm against the desk to prop up his forehead with his hand.
“I’m a real idiot...” He had snapped when she told him that she would have preferred having a beast head instead. There was no way that she would have understood the hardships that came from that. There was no way he could find joy in hearing someone say they envied that. The same presumably went for Rosemarie. No matter how fainthearted she was, it was natural that she would have been angry.
He dropped his gaze down to the letter he sent for from Volland.
Stroking his face to iron out the tense wrinkles in his forehead, he picked up the letter.
“—Suppose I’ll deliver it later,” Claudio murmured to himself, as if he had made up his mind. He carefully put the white envelope away in his breast pocket and resumed his work.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Is that true?” From within the small, isolated confessional in the palace’s chapel, Archbishop Kastner responded to the court lady sitting across from him, a joyful expression on his face.
“Yes, His Highness has been flying a bird toward Volland every day as of late, but it is a familiar spirit of the Archmagus.”
“And you’re certain of that?”
“Yes, it is seldom used, but I have seen them bring it along in the past. That white hawk belongs to Archmagus Edeltraud,” the court lady declared, and Kastner couldn’t contain the smile on his face.
A sorcerer’s familiar spirit would never take form with someone else. That was why, unless what the court lady was saying was incorrect, the white hawk was not being tamed by Claudio.
It was understandable if the familiar was going back and forth between Claudio and Edeltraud, but the destination in question was Volland. Not only that, but with it being a daily event, it made him wonder why Claudio didn’t just use his own familiar.
It would have been impossible that Prince Claudio, the greatest sorcerer in all of Baltzar, didn’t have a familiar spirit of his own. One could easily create a familiar if they had the mana to do so. However, Kastner had realized all too late that he had not seen Claudio do that even once.
“There might be some sort of issue with Prince Claudio’s mana.” The ever-fastidious Claudio had finally shown a chink in his proverbial armor after all this time. A little investigation into this matter could produce some intriguing results.
As a condition to accede the throne of this country, one is required to have mana of the highest caliber. While it apparently had relevance to the Forbidden Forest, he was convinced that it was nothing to really pay any mind.
Word had it that, unlike his son’s, King Baltzar’s mana was quite insignificant.
In this country that was teeming with sorcerers, the state church held little clout. While they didn’t undermine the church, it had made for some bitter experiences on countless occasions. Men of the mystic robe and men of the holy cloth don’t see eye to eye. Their conflicting ideologies were a common topic, not just in Baltzar, but everywhere.
That was the very reason Kastner was trying to kick that threatening upstart Claudio out of his princely position and develop a candidate for crown price that was backed by the church.
“After all, being under the rule of a disfigured king is quite unbearable.” Claudio may have been called the second coming of the sacred beast and regarded in awe, but there was no shortage of people who despised him. Just like the court lady nodding deeply right before Kastner’s eyes.
Kastner had a feeling that delving into this new intelligence would prove to be in his favor, and his lips slowly curled into a smile.