Chapter 2: Tidings from Harold
THEY had so much fun at their girls-only party that it seemed to be over in the blink of an eye. With the setting sun behind them, Rosalind and Letizia said their farewells, and Amy, Isabelle, and Tigger watched them leave from the front door until their carriage rode out of sight.
“That was so much fun!” cried Amy, smiling up at Isabelle.
“I’m so glad you’ve made such wonderful friends, dear. How’s school been going?”
“It’s been fine. Some kids say rude things about me, but they always come around eventually. I recognize a lot of students’ surnames from the club bulletin, too.”
“Right, the Cat Club bulletin.”
The Cat Club, spearheaded by the Duchess of Coverdale, was incredibly well-known in aristocratic circles.
Ever since Amy had started assisting veterinarians in the Royal Capital at the duchess’s request, “Lady Amy, daughter of the Earl of Northland” had become a very familiar name among the Cat Club members.
In fact, one of the reasons why the teasing at school never really escalated was because many aristocratic pet owners had at some point been indebted to Amy’s healing magic.
As Amy turned to head back inside, Tigger mirrored her movements and trotted alongside her. After all these years, everyone in the Northland house was very used to the sight of Tigger marching right beside Amy like a security escort.
Tigger would have preferred it if Amy picked him up like a baby and carried him, but despite how much Amy had grown, picking him up was still a struggle. Tigger was massive, of course, but he was also so fluffy that when Amy held him, his fur obscured 80 percent of her vision.
“Oh, I just remembered!” said Isabelle. “We just got a letter from Hal—the first one in a while.”
“From Harold?! Where is he now? Is he doing all right?”
“I haven’t read it yet, actually. Your father went to work, and I was waiting for him to get back to open it. What do you think? Should we go ahead and read it?”
“Hmm… I am curious, but…I suppose if it had been really urgent, he would have used the guild to get in touch. Since it’s just a regular letter, nothing crazy must have happened.”
Amy was relieved that he’d sent word after such a long stretch of silence, but from their experiences thus far, her older brother’s letters never said anything significant. He wasn’t a very good correspondent, and the best they could hope for from his letters were two or three short sentences written in a scrawl.
“Knowing Harold, it’ll probably just say, ‘I’m at the ocean! The seafood’s great!’ or something like that,” Amy continued.
“They really are just little slips of paper reminding us that he’s alive, aren’t they?” agreed Isabelle, laughing with Amy. “Well, as long as he’s doing well, that’s all that matters. We’ll just all read it together when your father comes home, then.”
Sometimes Harold’s letters would include trinkets like unusual coins from the places he’d visited or scales from magical beasts he’d hunted, but the contents of his letters were always the same—simple and brief. Almost like he couldn’t shake his habits from text messaging in his past life. Sometimes Nicholas or Gilbert would write in a little more detail, and the Northlands could finally get a clearer picture of what Harold was up to.
“It’s still hard to believe that Harold was such a good student at school,” Amy said. “He recommended I take this one geography class—he said it was fun—but there were so many papers I had to write, and the homework was so difficult! No one could guess how many class credits he graduated with just by looking at him.”
“Hal always had a knack for remembering that kind of stuff, even in our previous lives. He knew exactly which types of monsters could appear on a random rocky stretch of land in any game. And he always went off, doing things on his own… Maybe it gave him a good foundation to build on.”
“That’s right… He’d spend all that time making those detailed game guides by himself for no reason. But he’d never study for his tests…”
“He could have allocated a little of that motivation in other areas… As it stands, he is the successor to your father’s earldom…” Isabelle grumbled, although she didn’t seem seriously concerned about it.
In Luducia, aristocratic titles and their territories were almost always inherited by a blood relative. Harold and Amy were the only two direct descendants of the Northland family, but because Amy was currently the Third Prince’s fiancée candidate, that left Harold as the only real successor.
An adventurer being the head of an aristocratic territory wasn’t entirely unheard of, but it tended to be adamantly opposed by the people living in the territory, so it certainly wasn’t the preferred arrangement.
With their father Joshua still in good health, however, Harold’s profession wasn’t an urgent issue.
Isabelle and Joshua thought that, even if Harold didn’t succeed the earldom, they would welcome either his future child or a suitable distant relative as the successor.
“But you know,” said Isabelle, cupping her cheeks and sighing, “these days, I’m more worried about whether Hal can get married at all.”
“Even if he did marry, he’d probably go off on a long hunting expedition right after the wedding and make his wife get fed up with him,” Amy reasoned.
Harold was obsessed with hunting magical beasts, and he had a track record of several failed relationships to show for it.
Isabelle and Joshua had a policy that their children were not to be forced into engagements before they were eighteen years old, and Amy was very glad they did. Being abandoned after getting engaged or married so your husband could go hunt monsters would be hard for anyone, no matter how loving or understanding they were.