Chapter 4, Part 2: By a Twist of Fate, I’m Working as my Rival’s Maid
AFTER the chaos in the drawing room on the top floor of the royal castle, and just when Mavis had spotted a certain object, Cesia was falling—headfirst—from the balcony she had just leapt off of. The forest stretched out below her, but at her current speed, she had no hope of the trees acting as a cushion for her fall. But she didn’t have any other choice. She couldn’t fly, but she had to try.
As she scolded herself for the tears welling up in her eyes and her desire to shrink into herself from fear, she aimed a wind spell directly at the ground and fired it off with as much power as she could muster. Wind puffed up from below. It reversed her fall, and her body floated slightly upward. That only lasted an instant. In the blink of an eye, she resumed her descent.
She repeated that again and again, carefully adjusting the power of her spell each time. Finally, after being thrown about in the air several times, she reached a height that looked safe to fall from and adjusted her body to break her fall as she approached the ground.
“Guh!” she grunted when she hit the ground, momentarily stunned. Unable to contain the momentum of her fall, she tumbled over and rolled. She remained still for a while, and after the pain faded, she sat up.
“I am never doing that again!” she loudly proclaimed. That was terrifying!
With tears still in her eyes, Cesia got to her feet. She had cast strengthening magic on her body as she fell and had taken the utmost care to hit the ground properly, so while injured somewhat, she had come away from the fall with all of her limbs still attached to her torso. Next, she cast a spell to seal a wound dripping with blood on her dominant arm. However, closing the injury was the best she could do; she couldn’t yet cast healing spells that were high-level magic and would have completely healed her. There were also bruises all over her body from the gusts that had caused her midair bounces, but she could move, so for the time being, she pretended she didn’t see them.
She carefully took one step, then another, making sure nothing impeded her ability to walk. Then, as quickly as possible, she put distance between herself and where she had landed. She didn’t know how much time she had until her pursuers from the castle showed up. After she took off the apron of her maid uniform, she looked at first glance to be wearing a plain dress, and as she walked, she used magic to change the color of her hair and eyes, her black hair slowly transforming into a golden blonde.
“If only I knew something like this would happen. I should’ve practiced using magic to disguise myself as a man,” she lamented.
Cesia had been prized for being a female enforcer, so she hadn’t expected a time would come when it was advantageous for her to hide the fact that she was a woman. Even if she had hastily pulled a disguise together, it would have looked unnatural when she moved, so she made do with only altering her hair and eyes.
As she gathered her bearings and advanced through the forest, Cesia thought of her next moves. Her pursuers would search the castle and forest, then go to the castle town. If she had been her old self, she would’ve preferred to escape through the forest and head to another city, but now, she had to return to the castle, so she went toward the town. She wasn’t the stray cat she had been in the past; she had things of her own now, people she knew, and a place to call home.
No one in the castle suspected Anita was the spy—not even Marcus. Cesia didn’t think that any of the other members of the Second Financial Audit Division would leak the contents of their investigation to anyone, but if Anita, the second princess’s head maid, asked the Security Bureau for information that she said pertained to the princess’s security, they would tell her if there weren’t any pressing reasons not to. When she thought of it that way, it wouldn’t be easy for Cesia to tell the Second Division the spy’s identity. It was highly likely that she would get caught in Anita’s information network while trying to establish contact with them.
Cesia had taken as many measures as possible when she had escaped via the balcony, but if Anita or Juliette found her, it would all be for nothing. Still, the idea that had struck her back then had been her best option. The worst thing she could have done was to get caught. It would have been simple for Anita to fabricate physical evidence against her and plant it somewhere where it could be found, like in her accommodations. In that case, Cesia would probably be made out to be the spy for the criminal syndicate. And if that happens, I don’t even want to know who will be framed as the mastermind behind it all, Cesia thought.
The person really behind everything—Juliette—was trying to flee to safety. Marcus and the rest of the Second Division wouldn’t be fooled, but without 100 percent definite evidence, they couldn’t do anything about Juliette, no matter how solid of a case they had against her. After all, she was the princess of a foreign country.
“Evidence. Evidence, huh…?”
With how audaciously Juliette had smeared Cesia in front of everyone, there was no way anyone would find anything implicating her while she was in Emeroade. That might change after she returned to Gwyllt, but the Second Division didn’t have the authority or the means to pursue her that far. The battle would be decided now while Juliette was still in the country. Juliette had gone so far as to expose her own spy to keep Cesia away, so her plan must have been close to fruition, whatever her goal was.
That was as much as Cesia could guess at. It didn’t suit her to run and hide out of fear of false accusations, and anyway, her creed was constant, determined resistance. She would fight with all her power and shake off any trouble that befell her, and no matter what, she had to get payback on anyone who tried to set her up.
The best defense is offense! she thought and said, “All right!”
Alone in the forest and brimming with fighting spirit, Cesia had forgotten one thing: why Juliette had exposed Anita and caused all that commotion in the first place. Thanks to Anita, Juliette would have known that Cesia wasn’t just an ordinary maid but an enforcer working under Marcus at the Second Financial Audit Division. It followed that she would also have guessed that Cesia had been disguised as a maid to monitor her. Juliette had disliked Cesia from the start, so Cesia had assumed that Juliette had just wanted to remove an unwelcome observer. But, with both her mind and body exhausted by the day’s unexpected events, Cesia had overlooked just how sneaky and cunning Juliette Lani Gwyllt was.