Aresh was in conversation with Egorova’s fourth princess, whom the kingdom was offering up as a marriage partner.
Nobody in the room failed to understand the significance of this, but Erene still held her ground.
“Oh, then please allow us to sit in. I would love to meet the princess who might become my brother’s spouse.”
At the “brother’s spouse” part, Norbert and Orjef cast anxious looks in Seiichirou’s direction. But what point was there in getting worked up about it now?
“Yes, but…” Lars sounded reluctant.
“I’d like to meet her, too, please.” Yua added her weight to the ring.
Judging that it would be unwise to keep refusing Romany’s guest of honor and Aresh’s older sister, Lars capitulated easily.
“Oh, but my sister is sickly, so you might be subjected to an unpleasant sight…,” Lufina said worriedly.
“Don’t worry, that would be our fault for barging in on her anyway,” answered Yua, who could have stood to be a bit more concerned.
The women took the lead, while Lars and the men hung back behind them. Ist trailed last, gawking at everything in his path. Sigma valiantly dragged him along to keep up with the group. Seiichirou made a mental note to himself to give Sigma a bonus allowance when they got back.
“I’m honored that you would make such a long trip to visit us. Thank you, Mr. Rhoda,” said Lars.
“Oh no, we ought to apologize for the sudden visit. I heard after the fact that our commander was chosen to be a guard…”
Orjef apologized; he was no good at mind games and probing people. Lars and his group had probably already figured out why the Holy Maiden’s courtesy visit was happening so abruptly without any of the usual red tape.
Lars’s immaculate eyebrows creased into a frown. “No, we’re the ones who imposed first. Although I should mention that it was Commander Indolark himself who suggested coming to Egorova.”
“What, really?!” Norbert yelled in surprise.
To be fair, it was hard for anyone to drag Aresh of all people anywhere, let alone out of his country. Seiichirou had more or less imagined that he had chosen to do so of his own volition.
“But we are also guilty of not discarding our hopes regarding the proposal.” Lars paused there and looked at Seiichirou. “I’m surprised you came as well. I can see that your talents extend to negotiation.”
Seiichirou could see that the ladies had stopped in front of a door, which told him that Aresh and the fourth princess were probably inside. Lars, Orjef, and the others came to a halt, too.
An Egorovan maid knocked on the door. Lufina announced their presence, and the path opened for them. The ladies entered the room first, and Seiichirou took a step after them.
At the same time, he opened his mouth to speak.
“No, I’m just here to take back my man.”
“What?”
The room was simpler than the reception lounge. That said, it was still a palace room, which meant that it was furnished with luxury items.
Seiichirou’s target was sitting at the far end of the room, his black-clad back facing the door. The princess was sitting across from him at a table, and she stood up when she spotted the newcomers. The man directly in front of her turned around a beat later.
“Lufina,” the princess called out her sister’s name with a bell-like voice.
The man in front of her swung his large frame around at that moment.
And then…
“What are you doing here?!”
He rushed straight over to Seiichirou, completely ignoring Lufina, Erene, and even Lars.
“Don’t you know what kind of place this is?! Why the hell would you come here when your barrier is fading? Do you have a death wish?!” Aresh barked at him, his large hands planted on Seiichirou’s shoulders.
Any normal person—no, even a Romany knight—would have shrunk in the face of such a formidable man, but Seiichirou was unmoving.
“I came to talk to a certain someone who doesn’t bother communicating,” he retorted. “I did take precautions, you know.”
“Precautions?”
“The prototype from Ciro.”
For one, Seiichirou wasn’t supposed to talk without wearing the special mask. Aresh’s frown deepened when Seiichirou produced the medicine. Yet, before Aresh could resume his lecture, someone else touched him on the shoulder from behind.
“You’ve got some nerve ignoring me, Aresh.”
Upon being subjected to a sharp gaze not dissimilar to his own, Aresh’s frown transformed from “worried” to “annoyed.”
“What are you doing here, Erene?”
“What a way to speak to your older sister. Who do you think is responsible for getting you two in the same room without a hitch?”
Instead of focusing on the familiar squabble between the two intimidatingly beautiful siblings, Orjef seemed more preoccupied with the fourth princess.
Not that his reaction was surprising.
If the third princess, Lufina, was around twelve, then the fourth princess had to be even younger. It wasn’t so unusual for royal and noble marriages to be decided from an early age to preserve bloodlines and family names. Age gaps were common enough. Seiichirou knew this.
But still…
“Um… May I ask how old the fourth princess is?” Seiichirou heard Norbert ask Lars hesitantly. This was what everyone was dying to know.
Lars parted his perfectly shaped lips. “She will be four this year.”
“Bwah! Ngh! Urk! Ahem!” Orjef’s mouth produced a series of strangled noises. He hurriedly shut his mouth and pretended it was all a cough.
But no, Seiichirou understood.
He knew about age gaps and arranged marriages.
But it was still extremely funny to see the tall and imposing Aresh next to a three-year-old girl.
“Orjef…I have some words for you later.” Aresh, who should have been preoccupied in his verbal sparring with Erene, turned to glare at his cousin. The smile instantly vanished from Orjef’s lips.
“Er, don’t you have something to say to me first?” Seiichirou spoke up.
Aresh fell silent.
Lufina gazed in surprise at the suddenly cowed Aresh, but then she seemed to remember something and ran over to the fourth princess’s sofa. “Sofia!”
Lars was also quick to rush over to his sisters.
The fourth princess, named Sofia, had the same silver hair as Lars. It hung in a braid past her shoulders. Coupled with her spotless skin, she was quite a pretty young girl, but her wide, bluish-purple eyes were downcast, her face had a terrible pallor, and her breathing was ragged.
“What…?”
“Apologies, but my sister is sickly. She might have gotten anxious from seeing new faces. Call a healer over right away,” Lars told an attendant as he clutched Sofia’s tiny body.
“I can use healing magic.” Yua raised her hand.
“Wait.” Seiichirou took a step forward, stopping Yua in her tracks.
“What are you—?”
Seiichirou approached the young princess and peered at her tentatively so as not to appear rude.
The pallor, the sweat, the labored breathing. It all looked familiar…no, it was familiar. He’d experienced it with his own body. Seiichirou looked back at Aresh. A look of understanding came over him when their eyes met.
“This…is magic poisoning!” they declared.
“Magic poisoning…?” the others in the room muttered, not looking quite convinced of this out-of-the-blue diagnosis.
Seiichirou ignored them and pulled out the medicine Ciro had given him, but then he thought better of it and handed Lars one of his extra masks instead. “This mask will absorb magicules. This is a spare, so I haven’t used it yet. Please give it to Her Highness.”
“What?” Lars blinked, and then said hesitantly, “All right.”
Seiichirou turned to Yua next. “Shiraishi, please cast purification before you use your healing magic. You can limit it to this room.”
“Huh? Oh, sure. Okay.”
If Sofia was as weak to magicules as Seiichirou was, then the first order of business was ridding the room of magicules.
Yua clapped her hands together as if she was in prayer and chanted a song-like spell. In that instant, a wind blew in the room. People who weren’t normally conscious of magicules wouldn’t be able to tell, but Seiichirou could see at once that the air was now clear.
Sofia’s breathing stabilized at that same moment.
“What is…going on…?” Lars gaped at the girl in his arms. Lufina looked similarly shocked.
In lieu of a response, Seiichirou’s knees buckled, for the aftereffects of the purification magic left him slightly reeling. Aresh caught Seiichirou in his arms.
“Ah, my apologies,” Seiichirou said. “Your Highness Prince Lars, allow me to inform you that Her Highness the Fourth Princess most likely has a weakness to magicules.”
Sofia’s condition had settled, but given her tender age, the servants still took care in handling her. She was soon carried off to her bedroom to rest.
Seiichirou and the others returned to the reception room, where they chatted once more with Lars and Lufina. Erene, Yua, Aresh, and Seiichirou took the front seats. Seiichirou tried to stand back, but Aresh forced him to sit next to him.
“Sofia has never possessed much magic, and her frailty often confines her to bed,” Lars explained.
One could see the Egorovan’s strong bias toward magic and technical prowess in his words. It made sense for a nation founded on its magic research and tools. Here in this frigid, mountainous land, one could genuinely say that technological progress meant everything.
Given that one needed magical power to research magic tools, Egorova’s nobility regarded a person’s magical capacity as a mark of status.
“Sofia…was born from a foreign mistress,” Lufina said hesitantly, prompting Norbert to lift his head.
A bastard child born from an immigrant woman with no connection to nobility or royalty. Even if she was regarded as a member of the royal family, the girl’s low birth and meager magic coupled with her sickly body meant that she occupied an extremely precarious position.
“Given her frail constitution…there were some who suggested marrying her off into a prominent rural clan or a wealthy merchant family before she got much older.”
She was considered that useless to the royal family. Lars would resent the nobles who said as much for the rest of his life.