Is he aware of his daughter’s crimes?
Van went straight to the point and spoke frankly. “I suspect that your daughter is involved with this assassination incident. What do you think, Marquis?”
“M-My daughter? There is no way! She cannot possibly be involved!” the marquis cried out. He explained that his daughter had adored and respected Van ever since she was a child. He insisted that she would never try to kill the Dragon Duke.
“I feel that the Lady Fenetra I knew as a child and Lady Fenetra today are completely different people. Do you have any thoughts on that, Marquis?” Van asked, pressing him further.
“My daughter changed? M-My daughter? M-M-M-My d-d-d—”
The marquis suddenly started acting very strangely. His head bent back and his eyes rolled back into his head, exposing their whites. He started floundering about the room, and the knights had to support him so he wouldn’t fall over.
But in the next moment, he regained lucidity and flashed us a big smile.
“My daughter is the same as always. While she was quiet and introverted as a child, she has become more active and lively through interacting with the villagers,” the marquis said.
It wasn’t normal—he was answering like nothing had happened despite being restrained by the knights. There was no doubt that someone was manipulating a part of Marquis de Noisette’s mind.
“Knights, arrest Marquis de Noisette!” Van ordered.
“Yes, milord!” The knights dragged the marquis out of the room.
Even as he was being dragged out, the man kept blabbering praise for Fenetra.
“You may not take my word for it as her father, but she is a very kind daughter. Lord Dragon Duke, I am sure that you will love her!”
Madeleine must have been terrified—she was trembling. I put my arms around her to calm her down.
A few messenger knights entered the room, trading places with the knights who had escorted Marquis de Noisette out. They had come from the capital on wyvernback to deliver a report.
“Lord Dragon Duke, the substance on the knife has been identified,” a knight began. An alchemist in the capital who specialized in poisons had examined the blade used in the stabbing.
Van’s expression became more and more grim as he pored over the report given by the knights.
“Brother, what was the substance applied to the weapon?” Lady Opera asked.
“It was roro mushroom extract,” Van announced.
“What?!” I exclaimed. I became dizzy and my body felt wobbly. Parfeil immediately supported me before I could fall over. “No way... That can’t be! Van, are you okay?!”
“Yes, there’s no need to worry,” he said.
Roro mushrooms were a tasty treat for normal humans, but for dragonkin, they were deadly poison. They were fatal to dragonkin, and even just touching them would be enough to cause symptoms of poisoning to appear. In the era before Charlotte had been born, there had been an incident where dragonkin who had been invited to the Kingdom of Sacristan had died one after the other. For a while, their cause of death had remained unknown, but it had been thought that they were murdered as the kingdom’s citizens had been unharmed. However, it had been found out that the sautéed roro mushrooms served at the kingdom’s banquet had been the cause.
After that incident, it became forbidden to harvest roro mushrooms or to bring them into the Dragon Duchy of Éclair. In the hundred years since Charlotte’s death, it’d been thought that these mushrooms had gone extinct. Since they could no longer be found in the wild, they were only being cultivated by a handful of farmers in the Kingdom of Sacristain and its neighboring countries. And as the sale and purchase of these mushrooms were also forbidden, it was thought that those farmers had long since shut down their businesses.
“My body differs from that of the average dragonkin, so I won’t die just by touching or eating roro mushrooms,” Van said. “Still, it was enough to knock me out.”
It was fortunate that that’d been the extent of the damage to Van’s body.
Still, it terrifies me to think what could have happened if his body weren’t special.
“Mille-Feuille, it looks like it was the right call to disguise you as one of my attendants,” Van said.
If I had come here as the Dragon Duchess consort, I would’ve had to accompany Van on his trips. Though we still had no idea what the culprit’s motives were, they might have made an attempt on my life. Or, if I had witnessed them trying to kill Van, I might have tried to shield him from harm. In that case, I might have been the one to die from the roro mushroom’s poison.
One of the big mysteries here was the use of roro mushroom poison to attack Van. If their goal was to assassinate him, it would’ve been enough to just stab him in the stomach. Were they aware of Van’s unnatural vitality and wanted to make sure that he died?
“The culprit wouldn’t have been able to obtain those mushrooms overnight. I can only surmise that this attack had been planned for a long time,” I speculated aloud.
“You’re right. People even go as far as to say that roro mushrooms are extinct.”
And even then, why would Fenetra, a dragonkin woman, use something that’s so poisonous to us?
“Is Fenetra not the culprit...?” Madeleine muttered.
Indeed, I considered that it could be someone else too, but... “There’s no one else who seems suspicious,” I argued.
“Yes, but I cannot imagine her impulsively using roro mushroom poison to commit this crime.”
It would have taken her a long amount of time to obtain the mushrooms and prepare an assassin to deliver the poison to Van. This certainly had been in the making for quite a while.
Should we just ask her directly? I can’t imagine she’d answer any of our questions outright, though...
“Mille-Feuille, you mentioned that Fenetra was hiding something in the underground atelier and that she blew up at a maid who peeked in there, didn’t you?” Van asked me.