FSW Chapter 3

Along the path to the knights' training grounds, following Hilton's lead, Nishina looked down at the basket with an unusually serious expression.

Inside the heavy basket sat a full offering of peanut cookies and cream cheese muffins, meant as gifts for the knights.

She'd deliberately chosen snacks that weren't too sweet, but she wasn't sure the knights would even like them. If she was honest, there was a shallow calculation behind the gesture too—handing something over on their very first meeting might leave a good impression.

"Hm—maybe pie would have been better than cookies or muffins, after all."

"Give them flour with Your Highness's name on it and they'd catch it in their mouths grateful."

At Hilton's firm reply, the faint furrow that had gathered between Nishina's brows eased on its own.

It was a ridiculous thing to say, but the image of grown men, delighted over a handful of inedible flour, was funny all on its own.

"By the way—are you truly set on choosing from among the apprentices?"

His voice came a touch downcast, and she glanced up at him. Hilton's eyes, already slightly drooping, had sunk further still. Being refused to his face must have wounded him more than she'd realized. Hoping to raise his spirits, she rushed to explain.

"It's precisely because Sir Hilton is such a talented genius that I'm worried! If you had to teach a beginner like me, you might get so frustrated you'd make yourself sick!"

"That's not true at all!"

"Besides, Sir Hilton has to escort me, train the other knights, and carry out Father's orders—you'd need three bodies just to manage it all, wouldn't you?"

"Well, that's true, but…"

Unable to argue that point, he still looked far from convinced. He probably still thought it would be better for her to learn from a full knight than an apprentice. Before he could suggest something entirely unhelpful to her plans, she got ahead of him, breezy.

"Honestly, the real problem is that you're too gifted, Sir Hilton."

"Pardon?"

"If you were only a little less talented, you could have been my teacher yourself. Weren't you supposedly this brilliant with a sword even as a child?"

"I wouldn't say—"

"These days you're the most talented swordsman in the whole empire—no, the whole continent. A teacher a thousand, ten thousand times too good for someone as ordinary as me."

"That's… not…"

"So really, this is all because you're too talented. Why do you have to be this talented? Hm?"

"P—please stop, Your Highness…"

The more mischievously she pressed, the redder Hilton's face got. Even his ears had gone red—a few more words and he might cook through entirely. Chasing after him as his pace picked up, oddly quick, she kept searching for more praise to give—but, unfortunately, none of it made it out of her mouth.

It wasn't that she'd suddenly felt bad for him, flustered as he was.

It was because a familiar face stood directly ahead of her.

The mischief in her expression flattened at once. Aiden was looking at her, his eyes bitterly cold. He must have just come from training in the exercise yard—he was dressed simply. Her gaze, drawn briefly to his damp, sweat-soaked hair, dropped lower. His face had grown gaunter than before.

'Is he even eating properly these days—'

Worry rose in her, unbidden—but, unrelated to it, he withdrew his cold gaze and passed her by, as though he'd seen nothing at all.

"B—brother!"

Nishina caught at Aiden's sleeve, urgent. Her hand moved first. Before thought. She had no idea what had made her grab him at all. But—

The hand gripping the end of his sleeve had gone bloodless white. Desperation had put far too much strength into it.

"What is this."

Aiden looked down at the sleeve caught in her grip, contemptuous, and asked, irritated. His voice, without a trace of warmth, filled her throat with too many words at once. The rage she'd faced right before she collapsed rose up in her memory again. However frightening that feeling had been, it wasn't as though she couldn't understand it.

Their father's indifference. His mother, gone mad. The retainers who never stopped demanding he prove his worth. Growing up fiercely in that barren environment, her death must have been the final line his patience could hold.

Once he'd given up on patience, all that was left to him was rage, raw and unrefined.

"I heard the news—"

Nishina trailed off, faltering.

That morning, before seeing her father, she'd heard from Joy what had happened while she was unconscious. The day after the Empress's funeral, the Emperor had apparently caused a great stir by announcing plans to formally crown the Imperial Consort Melissa as Empress—plans he'd since withdrawn.

The Imperial Consort had stopped it, insisting it wasn't the time, not with the Princess herself lying unconscious—but he must have already been wounded by it, all over again. It ached to think of him, unable to find comfort even in his own family's death, utterly alone. But comfort—at least from her, specifically, the Imperial Consort's own daughter—was the one thing she couldn't offer.

Whatever her true feelings were, the moment she spoke them aloud, to him they would sound like nothing but mockery.

In the end she forced them down—the words pooled thick in her throat, shoved down like something that wouldn't go. When she let go of his sleeve, bloodless white, Aiden turned and walked off without another word.

Only once his rumpled sleeve had passed out of sight did Nishina, too, quicken her steps again. Wanting to run after him and catch his arm, wanting to apologize without any order to the words—both were only her own selfish wanting.

For now, all she could do was hope that her own existence, at the very least, wasn't a wound to him.

The training grounds, thick with dust and the smell of sweat, were not a place a visitor could enter unnoticed. The training yard reserved for the imperial family sat elsewhere, so it was vanishingly rare for a member of the imperial family to set foot in the grounds belonging to the knights alone.

And yet here was an unannounced visit from a royal—and not just any royal, but the empire's treasure, its Princess. Even the knight-commander overseeing their training lowered his sword and turned to look at the cause of the commotion.

All eyes fixed on her at once, but Nishina's own gaze swept the crowd searching for a single person. With this many people gathered, would she even be able to find him?—she'd worried for nothing.

She didn't need to search hard at all. Even tucked away in a corner, that dazzling silver hair caught the eye on its own, effortlessly. She stopped short, staring at him without meaning to—and, as if he'd felt her gaze, he turned his head too.

And the moment their eyes met across the open space, Nishina thought of a flower she'd loved once, in winter. In a cold season that fogged the breath, blooming alone and proud across the wide white snowfield—a red camellia. His eyes were the very image of that flower.

"…Lovely."

The way she'd once marveled, purely, at that flower's beauty—the same honest admiration slipped out now, at his beautiful eyes. Whether he'd caught the small murmur or not, his eyes flickered, just once. But the reaction vanished, quick, without leaving so much as a trace behind.

He lowered his eyes—and, as if even that wasn't enough, dropped his head too. Even under a gaze that must have been plainly obvious, his own never once lifted.

Like a habit. Like something learned by rote. He stood like that, grinding the flower into the earth.

Even once he no longer met her eyes, Nishina kept turning the color over in her mind, vivid and unwilling to fade. It wasn't only the resemblance in beauty that had made her think of the camellia, seeing his eyes.

A camellia doesn't scatter its petals one by one. It just—drops. The whole head, all at once, thud. He resembled that particular desolation.

That something so beautiful could also feel so lifeless struck her as strangely contradictory. Not human, those eyes. No life in them at all. Flat as a dead fish's. Even at the moment his head finally snapped off—she guessed—nothing would show in those eyes. Nothing at all.

Nishina traced haltingly back through his past. It was a history more brutal even than the one described for Aiden, brutal as that already was. The second son of a count's house governing a territory bordering the frontier, he'd had the misfortune to be born with rare red eyes.

Red eyes are a mark of the devil. With baseless superstition running deep, he'd been shunned from the moment of his birth.

The one person who might have sheltered him—his mother, a former maid—had died in a difficult labor.

Rumors spread that some woman of unknown origin had lain with a devil, but because he'd happened to inherit his father's own silver hair, he hadn't been cast out entirely. Even so, he'd had to grow up all but abandoned, cared for by no one.

That was likely why his gaze stayed fixed to the dirt like that.

Watching him, tucked away and hiding his eyes, made something churn in her stomach. She couldn't tell if it was anger or the want to cry.

She forced her twisted mouth back into something steadier.

She was the one who needed pity—and here she was, pitying him. What was she even doing. Nishina, with effort, dragged her gaze away from him. She looked instead toward the figure approaching her.

Richard, commander of the Second Imperial Knight Order, who had been leading the demonstration at the front of the group. He looked thoroughly startled by Nishina's sudden visit.

"This, first of all. It felt wrong to come empty-handed as an uninvited guest. Please share it among yourselves."

"An uninvited guest? Your Highness is welcome here anytime!"

"Everyone, take a break!"

Richard called out, then passed the basket he'd been handed to the nearest knight. The apprentice knights, drenched in sweat, had been given an unplanned rest and a gift of food besides, and now looked at Nishina as though she were something close to an angel.

Scattered in twos and threes into the shade of the trees ringing the grounds, the apprentice knights dropped down wherever they landed and shared out the cookies and muffins between them. Even as they steadily worked their way through the snacks, their eyes kept sliding toward Nishina. They were plainly curious what had brought her here.

"So, what brings you here?"

Richard, apparently just as curious, finally asked before he could hold it back. The answer came not from Nishina, but from Hilton. While Hilton explained the whole situation to Richard, Nishina let her eyes wander again, searching once more for that silver hair.

She found him easily enough. He was looking down, expressionless, at the cookie a fellow knight had just handed him.

'He's not just going to throw it away, is he.'

He did carry the air of someone who wouldn't so much as glance at a cookie. But if he really did throw it away, it might leave a faint scratch somewhere in her chest.

But he ate it—expressionless, but clean through, not a crumb left, despite his indifferent face. It was a good thing, after all, that she hadn't come empty-handed. Only moments earlier she'd regretted bringing anything at all—and now, the nerve of her, thinking the exact opposite.

What should the next bribe be? While she was seriously considering it, Richard, apparently having caught the gist of her purpose, asked in an oddly careful tone.

"So—you're looking for a teacher from among the apprentices?"

"A teacher, and something like a training partner, I suppose?"

She gently corrected his phrasing, and he nodded, small, seeming to understand a little better now.

"In that case—I was hoping you might recommend someone, Sir Richard. Preferably whoever's most skilled, if possible."

She asked it knowing full well who the most skilled among them was—but Richard, unbothered, gave her the wrong answer entirely.

"Then how about Henry?"

He gestured toward a boy with light green hair. Catching Nishina's eye, the boy flinched, then offered an awkward smile.

"He's plenty skilled, and he's got an easygoing temperament, so Your Highness wouldn't feel—"

"No! I want the best! The most skilled! Swordsman here—that one, period!"

Having already left a small scratch in Hilton's heart, and now in another knight's besides, Nishina shook her head, firm. She leaned in close, emphasizing her terms.

There's only one person who fits that description, isn't there?

Please, please call him over—she willed it, eyes wide, until Richard, visibly reluctant, finally gave the right answer.

"The Russell boy has the most skill, technically—but he—"

"Wonderful!"

"Pardon?"

Before he'd even gotten properly into the explanation, Nishina seized his hand and nodded hard, clearly intent on cutting off anything further.

Richard looked down at her, his expression complicated, and reluctantly called him over.

"Russell."

Though the distance wasn't especially close, the boy came walking over the moment his name was called.

"I greet Her Imperial Highness. I am Lavis Russell."

Eyes still lowered, he bowed his head in greeting. Lavis Russell. That was the hunter's name.

"Her Highness the Princess would like to learn swordsmanship—could you help her with that?"

Richard asked, his expression far from pleased. It was plain he was hoping the boy would refuse. But even a "request" from a member of the imperial family was, in the end, a command. There was no way a mere apprentice knight could refuse it. It was an underhanded method, admittedly, but Nishina was that desperate. Knowing full well he couldn't refuse, she still couldn't hide the anxiety in her eyes. She watched him, pleading—

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

—and added that, on top of it. His indifferent gaze met hers, briefly, before dropping away again. Eyes lowered once more, Lavis nodded without a word. At the positive answer, she grabbed his hand before she'd even realized she meant to. His hand flinched, faint—but Nishina, too full of joy, never noticed.

"Thank you! I'll be counting on you!"

She squeezed the hand, larger than her own, and pumped it up and down, her voice bright with delight.

Still no words came back from Lavis—but the small nod he gave her was, all on its own, enough to satisfy her completely.