FSW Chapter 3

Camellia

Following Hilton's lead toward the training ground, Nishina looked down at the basket in her hands and let her expression go serious.

Inside the substantial basket were peanut butter cookies and cream cheese muffins, meant as gifts for the knights. She had deliberately kept them on the less-sweet side—but would knights actually enjoy something like this? There was also, if she was being honest with herself, a rather transparent ulterior motive: surely bringing a gift on a first meeting would make a good impression.

"Hmm. Maybe I should have gone with pie instead of cookies and muffins."

"If Your Highness gives it to them, they'd be happy to receive plain flour."

Hilton's reply was unequivocal, and the mild frown Nishina had been wearing dissolved on its own.

It was a ridiculous thing to say—but the image of a room full of grown men receiving a bag of raw flour and being genuinely pleased about it was so absurd it was funny. She was still quietly amused when, at her side, Hilton spoke again in a voice with just a touch of something deflated in it.

"All the same—are you truly set on choosing from among the apprentices?"

She glanced up at him. Hilton's eyes—normally just slightly downturned at the corners—were aimed considerably further down than usual. Being turned down to his face had apparently left a mark. She rushed to defend herself before his expression could settle into anything worse.

"It's precisely because Sir Hilton is such an extraordinarily gifted knight! If you were to teach a beginner like me, you'd burst a vessel from sheer frustration!"

"I absolutely would not!"

"And besides—Sir Hilton is already managing my escort duties, overseeing the knights' training, and carrying out Father's orders. Three bodies wouldn't be enough."

"That's—well —"

He couldn't argue the point, but the expression on his face remained thoroughly unconvinced. He was probably thinking that even so, a formal knight would be better than an apprentice. Before he could suggest something that would be absolutely no use to her plans, she got there first, deploying the most artless sincerity she could manage.

"The problem is that Sir Hilton is simply too gifted."

"...I beg your pardon?"

"If you'd been even a little less of a genius, you could have been my instructor. But you've been this extraordinary with a sword since you were young, haven't you?"

"I'm not so remarkable as all—"

"And now you're among the finest swordsmen in the Empire—no, the continent—far too precious to be wasted on a novice like me."

"That's—I wouldn't say—"

"So really, this is entirely your fault for being so capable. What were you thinking, being this talented? Hmm?"

The more pointedly she pushed, the more color flooded into Hilton's face. His ears had gone red. A few more sentences and he might be cooked through entirely. His pace had mysteriously accelerated, and Nishina kept up dutifully, still selecting her next compliment with great care—but it never made it out of her mouth.

Not because the sight of him at a loss had made her feel too guilty.

Because she had looked up and found a familiar face directly ahead.

The mischief went out of her expression at once. Aiden was watching her with eyes that could have cut glass. He had apparently come from the training hall—he was in lighter clothes, and his hair, damp at the front with sweat, caught her attention for only a moment before she looked away, down. His face had grown thinner than she remembered.

She wondered if he was eating.

The worry arrived and sat, separate from the cold gaze he withdrew, passing her as if she had not been there at all.

"O—Brother!"

Nishina moved before she had finished the thought. Her hand had already closed around the hem of his sleeve. She didn't understand her own impulse. But—

The hand clutching the cuff of his sleeve went white. The desperation had put real force into it.

"What."

Aiden looked down at the captured sleeve with contempt and asked, irritated. His voice carried no warmth of any kind. Words rose and crowded in her throat. She thought of his eyes at the funeral—the rage she had met there. She had been frightened by it. But she had not failed to understand it.

A father's indifference, and a mother gone mad, and retainers who demanded unceasing proof of his worth. To have grown into himself through all of that, and then to lose even her—it must have been the last limit of what he could bear.

When he finally abandoned endurance, all that remained to him was raw fury.

"I heard the news…"

Nishina began, and then went quiet, her mouth closing.

That morning, before visiting the Emperor, she had heard from Joy about what had passed during her days unconscious. The very day after the Empress's funeral, the Emperor had announced his intention to hold a formal elevation ceremony for the Imperial Consort—the news had apparently caused an enormous scene. Her mother had objected that this was no time for it, not with the princess collapsed, and it hadn't happened—but he would already have been wounded again. Alone in his grief with no one to receive him. She wished she could offer comfort. But condolences, of all things, were what she—the Imperial Consort's daughter—could not give.

Whatever her true feelings, the moment she said it, to him it would sound like mockery.

She swallowed every word down in the end—with effort, one at a time. When she released the white-knuckled grip on his sleeve, Aiden was gone in an instant.

Not until the crumpled hem of his sleeve had passed beyond her sight did Nishina move again. Running after him and holding on. Pouring out some incoherent apology. Both were nothing but wanting. 

For now, all she could do was hope that her existence alone did not wound him.

A guest arriving at the training ground—thick with the smell of dirt and sweat—was more than enough to cause a scene. The training ground was the knights' own space; the imperial family had a separate hall for their own use. A member of the imperial family appearing here was extraordinarily rare.

And yet here, now, was an unexpected imperial visitor—and the empire's own treasure, the princess, no less. Even the commander overseeing their training had lowered his sword to look at who had caused the commotion.

Every eye in the yard found her at once, but Nishina was rolling her gaze through the crowd after one specific person. She had worried she might not find him among so many.

It was easier than she expected. She wasn't even searching—and couldn't have missed him regardless. Even set apart in the far corner, the silver hair caught the eye as naturally as a snare. She stopped where she stood, looking at him without meaning to.

He felt the gaze. He turned his head.

And in the instant their eyes crossed in the open air between them, Nishina thought of a flower she had loved in the cold months. A red camellia, blooming in solitary splendor across a wide snowfield in the season where breath turned white. His eyes were exactly that flower.

"…Beautiful."

Just as she had been genuinely moved by that flower's beauty, the honest impression came out before she could stop it—small, reflexive. Whether the quiet word reached him, his eyes wavered for just an instant. Then the disturbance vanished without a trace, pulled back so quickly it might not have existed.

He dropped his gaze. And as if that wasn't sufficient distance, his head followed—bending down. It would be natural to feel the weight of her blatant attention. But his eyes never once moved upward to meet it.

Like a habit. Like something his bones had learned.

He stood there, pressing the flower into the ground.

Even without him looking at her any longer, the color she'd seen stayed vivid in her mind. What had made her think of camellias when she looked at his eyes was not only that the beauty resembled it.

The camellia does not scatter its petals one by one. It drops its head entire—the whole bloom at once, sudden and complete. He had that particular desolation in him—the quality that made the camellia beautiful and also the quality of its ending. The contradiction of it: so beautiful, and yet so without life.  Eyes with no more animation than a dead fish's—nothing human in them. She suspected that even in the moment that neck fell, those eyes would hold nothing.

Nishina tried to piece together what she knew of his past. It had been worse than Aiden's—and Aiden's was already described as nothing but hardship. The second son of a Count's house governing territory near the border, born with the misfortune of rare red eyes.

Red eyes were the mark of a demon. The superstition had no basis, but it was pervasive enough to matter—and so he had been rejected from the first breath he drew.

The only person who might have sheltered him, a handmaid-born mother, had died in the difficult labor that produced him.

Rumors had spread that a woman of unknown origin had consorted with something unnatural—but he had inherited his father's silver hair with such exactness that he couldn't be turned out entirely. Instead, he was simply left to grow up without anyone's care, more abandoned than raised.

That would be why his gaze had learned to stay buried in the ground.

Watching him from across the yard, eyes hidden in that far corner, her stomach turned over. She couldn't tell if it was anger or the kind of feeling that wanted to be crying.

She pulled the feeling's corners back into place with some effort.

She needed his sympathy. What was she doing, offering hers? Nishina made herself look away from him. In his place, she looked up at the figure approaching her.

Richard—Commander of the Imperial Second Knight Order—had been leading the demonstration at the front of the group. He looked genuinely startled by her unannounced appearance.

"Here—to start. Turning up uninvited with empty hands seemed rude." She held out the basket. "Please share these around."

"Uninvited—Your Highness is welcome here at any time!"

"All units—rest!"

Richard shouted, and passed the basket to the nearest knight. The apprentices, already drenched in sweat, found themselves with unexpected leave and snacks, and were now looking at Nishina approximately the way one looks at a saint descended from the heavens.

They drifted in groups of two and three into the shade of the trees ringing the yard, sitting wherever they liked, passing the cookies and muffins between them. Even as they ate, their eyes kept sliding back toward Nishina. They were clearly wondering what had brought her here.

"So—what brings Your Highness to us today?"

Richard, equally curious, was the first to ask outright. The answer came from Hilton, not Nishina. While Hilton explained the situation to Richard, Nishina rolled her gaze through the yard again after the silver hair.

She found him without difficulty. He was looking down at the cookie a knight had passed him with an expression that gave nothing away.

'Please don't throw it out.'

He had the kind of image that wouldn't glance twice at a cookie. But if he actually threw it away, she thought that would leave a small but definite scratch somewhere.

He didn't. His face stayed completely blank, and he ate it—cleanly, without ceremony. It really was good she hadn't come empty-handed. Never mind that seconds ago she'd been regretting bringing anything at all. That was Nishina's conclusion.

What should the next bribe be? She was considering this with full seriousness when Richard, apparently now informed of her purpose, asked in a tone that mixed several things at once:

"So—you intend to find a teacher from among the apprentices?"

"A teacher and a training partner, more or less."

The odd expression on his face prompted her to clarify his summary herself. He gave a small nod, as if this made somewhat more sense.

"In that case—might I suggest Henry?"

He gestured, and at the end of the direction he indicated was a boy with light green hair. His eyes met Nishina's; he startled visibly, then offered an awkward smile.

"His ability is serviceable, and he has an easy-going nature, so Your Highness wouldn't find him uncomfortable to be around—"

"No! I want to practice with someone with the absolute best ability—the very finest!"

Nishina, having left one scratch on Hilton's feelings and now collecting a second on a different knight's, shook her head without hesitation. She pressed forward with her requirement, bringing her face in close for emphasis.

'With that condition, there's only one possible answer.'

She opened her eyes wide, willing him silently to say the right name—and Richard's face did something complicated before he finally, reluctantly, gave it.

"The Russell boy does have the best skill among the apprentices, but that one is—"

"Perfect!"

"...Pardon?"

Before he'd finished the thought, Nishina had grabbed his hand with both of hers and was nodding vigorously. There was nothing about her posture that suggested she intended to hear whatever came next.

Richard looked down at her with an unreadable expression and called, with clear reluctance:

"Russell."

It wasn't a short distance. But the moment his name was called, he walked toward them—steadily, neither rushing nor hesitating.

"I attend before Her Imperial Highness. Lavis Russell."

Still with his eyes lowered, he bent his head in a formal bow. Lavis Russell. That was the hunter's name.

"Her Highness wishes to learn swordsmanship. Are you able to assist her?"

Richard asked with an expression that wanted him to say no. He was transparently hoping for a refusal. But however gently it was phrased as a request, this was the word of the imperial family. A mere apprentice knight had no standing to refuse. It was an underhanded tactic, and Nishina knew it—and even knowing he couldn't refuse, she couldn't quite hide the anxious edge in her eyes. She looked up at him with genuine appeal and added:

"I won't take up much of your time!"

The words were barely out when his empty gaze met hers for an instant and fell again. Lavis lowered his eyes once more and gave a single, wordless nod.

She grabbed his hand before she had decided to. His hand flinched, briefly—but Nishina, bright with relief, didn't catch it.

"Thank you! I'm in your care!"

She wrapped both hands around a hand larger than hers and shook it up and down—once, twice, the whole motion slightly too large—her voice bright with it.

No words came back from Lavis. But the one small nod he gave in return was, for Nishina, entirely enough.