It had been a while since I’d eaten dinner with Van. Lady Opera wanted to focus on making more wine tonight, so she wasn’t joining us.
“You’ve grown quite friendly with Opera while I was busy with work,” Van said.
“I suppose I have.”
“I’m always surrounded by stuffy men, and Duchesse rejects my requests to have some time to talk with you too.”
“Did you have a hard time getting permission to have dinner with me?”
“It’s no big deal.”
I was so surprised at just how much talking with Van relieved my mind. I wished that this moment could last forever.
But I now suspected that there was a second personality inside Van. “Van” was merely the secondary personality, and the main one was Vacherin—the one that Charlotte had fallen in love with a century ago.
I had no idea when Vacherin would show up again. And once Van was overtaken by Vacherin, I would never see him again.
Should I tell him about everything? I hesitated.
Van checked up on me. “What’s wrong? You look troubled.”
“It’s nothing.” I shook my head and cleared my thoughts. I was here eating dinner with Van. Letting my mind be occupied was just rude.
“Will you have some time during the Founding Anniversary?” Van asked.
“I should. What for?”
“I will tell you at that time.”
“All right, then.”
Van’s expression looked slightly clouded. It didn’t seem like he was saying that just to leave me hanging.
What could this be about? Perhaps it was better not to ask him yet.
In any case, the rest of our time was spent talking about recent goings-on with our lives.
That night, the white squirrels approached me to give their daily report.
“Squeak!”
The first squirrel gave me a fragment of vellum parchment covered in soot. It hadn’t burned up completely after being thrown into a fireplace and had been left behind. There was nothing written on it, but a second squirrel held up an empty ink bottle. It was one that’d held magic ink.
Writing with magic ink was convenient. Just by casting a spell, you could encrypt or erase messages, and with a simple magic formula, you could even have it automatically solve mathematical problems.
It seemed that the message on the vellum had been erased with magic ink before being burned in the fireplace. Normally, only the person who wrote with the ink would be able to manipulate what was written. However, there was also a catch. I recalled a trend that was going around the magic academy’s students. Words erased with magic ink could be revealed using holy water normally used for repelling monsters. Madeleine and I had even used it to read a letter once. A student at the academy had mentioned that she was going to write a letter to the Bureau of Magic Research about the product’s flaws, but I had no idea if she had ever managed to do so.
I took the bottle of monster-repelling holy water that Van had given me from the shelf. I placed the piece of vellum on a deep dish and soaked it in the holy water. Text began to appear...
“Regarding the redistribution of mana after the use of Suppression Magic. Among ten selected couples, ten of them succeeded...”
I could have sworn that the previous report said that the redistribution of mana failed. What is going on?
If I wasn’t mistaken, Duchesse was in charge of this research. I figured I should ask him about this.
The text on the vellum then began to emit a faint purple glow—mana trails, usually left when writing but invisible to the naked eye. It must have been the holy water’s effect.
I suddenly remembered that I’d seen the handwriting on the vellum before. I tried to think of where it had been.
Sharp letters with a hint of nervousness...
“Oh, the card!” I recalled the card I’d gotten with no sender listed. I had stuffed it deep into my drawer. “Found it!”
I removed the card from its envelope. The text written on it definitely looked similar to that on the piece of vellum. Just in case, I sprayed holy water on it, and like the vellum, the text on the card glowed purple.
I was about to finish up when a magic circle appeared on the card and a disturbing voice echoed inside my head.
“I will eliminate you!”
“Gah!” I shrieked, and the card and vellum burned away with no trace.
Parfeil and one of the guards must have heard my voice and they peeked into my room, clearly worried for my safety.
“Milady, what happened?” Parfeil asked.
“I have no idea...”
It would seem that it hadn’t merely been a card after all. I had even checked with my Evaluation Glasses. How could it have activated its magic now...?
All the evidence that I’d had was gone, but now, I had a lead on the culprit.
After the night I’d used Suppression Magic, the one who had been researching the redistribution of mana was Duchesse Langue de Chat. There was no way he could not have known about the results written on the vellum, considering that he’d been in charge of the research. He had proved its success but had decided to give Van a false report.
Duchesse, the chancellor of the duchy, was an assistant to Van and had acted as regent for the hundred years that the Dragon Duke had been sealed away. He could have kept the Dragon Duke sealed away and stayed in power for longer, but he’d chosen to revive the Dragon Duke from the seal of the stone tablet.