MB Chapter 15

【 Present 】

Three days was sufficient for Entzi Bethelgius's ship to complete its full circuit of the Orion River. When those three days had passed, Goiyo returned to the capital as Goiyo Bethelgius.

The harbor on the Orion River was not far from the residence, and so the two of them took a carriage—a magnificent thing drawn by four horses, despite the brevity of the journey.

Since the invention of trains, carriages pulled by multiple horses had become a rare sight. And yet Entzi, who had arranged for precisely such a carriage, seemed entirely unmoved by its extravagance. Goiyo, for her part, had grown sufficiently accustomed to his conspicuous habits that she found she was equally unmoved.

Entzi stepped out first and extended his hand with practiced ease, helping her down.

The marquess's residence was so vast and magnificent that one might have suspected it had been torn wholesale from the Imperial Palace itself—startling in its scale even to Goiyo, who had grown up familiar with both the Alte and Rubiette estates.

The spires rose sharply against the sky, and each ornament tracing its graceful curves had been wrought with evident care—refined enough that it never once suggested the vulgarity of new money.

Where does all this wealth come from, Goiyo thought, regarding the spectacle of dozens of lanterns burning in violet rows, as though mana stones had been pressed into their cores.

As she stood taking it in, a middle-aged man with an ash-grey mustache stepped forward and bowed.

"Welcome to the residence, my lady. I am the head butler, Lukurue Alto."

With his rippling mustache and round spectacles, his plump figure and modest height, Lukurue possessed a thoroughly comic appearance—and yet somehow, despite the easy warmth that impression suggested, he suited the splendid residence rather well.

"I am Goiyo Rubiette. A pleasure to meet you, Alto."

"No, my lady."

What is the lady's name? Entzi asked, in the patient tone one might use with a small child being guided through its lessons.

"Goiyo—Bethelgius."

"Well done."

"Please do call me Lukurue. It is an honor to serve you, Lady Bethelgius."

"If there is anything you require, you may speak to Lukurue directly." Entzi gave a slight shrug. "Though speaking to me would be the fastest, of course."

He exchanged a glance with Lukurue. A moment later, with a heavy sound, the great doors of the mansion swung open.

Allow me to show you around. Still holding Goiyo's hand—the same hand he had taken when helping her from the carriage—Entzi led her forward.

Without quite noticing she was being led, Goiyo followed him inside.

She had been trailing behind Entzi, growing gradually overwhelmed by the mansion's splendor, when a thought occurred to her.

"Is there anything I'm expected to do here? In the household, I mean."

"Not particularly. Most matters are handled by Lukurue and Kolave. Ah—Kolave is my chief aide. His name is Kolave Peroto; he's out at the moment on other business, but he should return by evening and come to pay his respects."

"I see."

She was not entirely ignorant of household management—but what she had studied was little more than a gentlewoman's education. Knowing that capable people were already managing things was, frankly, a relief.

Entzi, however, seemed to read something else into her easy acquiescence. A faintly troubled expression crossed his face, and he added, as though compelled to explain himself:

"I should clarify—I'm not keeping you from it because I don't trust you. I myself take very little hand in running the household. There are people who can manage it professionally, and it seems better to leave it to—"

"Of course it should be left to professional managers. Please don't concern yourself."

She had heard that properly managing a household—nothing so ambitious as an estate—required several years of practical experience at minimum. Given that she had less than a year remaining, she had no interest in clumsy and unnecessary effort.

"Now that I think of it," Goiyo said, "I understand you haven't yet been granted a fief since receiving your marquisate."

Entzi Bethelgius had come up to the capital not quite a year ago, and the conferral of his title was roughly contemporaneous. It was customary for a territory to be designated when a title was granted, which made it rather unusual that he had received no marquess lands as yet.

Though of course—it was a marquisate, not some baron's holding or viscount's estate. Handing over a territory of that magnitude could hardly be done casually.

'Ah, but becoming a grand duke is part of the plan all along—so perhaps the lands will come afterward?'

The thought resolved itself neatly, and Goiyo found she was satisfied.

"I've been proceeding with some care—ah, we've arrived at the garden."

The deflection was unmistakable. Having already answered the question to her own satisfaction, Goiyo followed his lead and looked up.

Her eyes widened.

The garden was so vast that it seemed incomprehensible she could have walked past it without noticing. And it was full—roses everywhere she looked. Red, pink, white, and colors she had no name for, roses in extravagant, impossible abundance.

The scent reached her all at once, and she drew back slightly—but even Goiyo, who had no great love of lavishness, could not deny that the scale of it was genuinely impressive.

"Is it a rose garden? It's quite magnificent. The gardener must have devoted a great deal of effort."

"It's a small hobby of mine."

"Ah, a small—"

She had been repeating the word back to him before she caught herself.

A hobby?

"Entzi did all this? But a garden this size—how—"

Had he learned the craft professionally? Even so, cultivating and maintaining a garden of this scale with a single pair of hands seemed an impossible undertaking. Entzi Bethelgius was not, after all, a man of idle leisure.

Or perhaps—he had hired gardeners and merely directed how it should be designed. That might be possible.

With the air of a man quietly proud of himself, Entzi answered.

"When you use magic, it's not particularly laborious."

"You can use magic for something like this?"

"Most people imagine attack spells or movement spells when they think of it, but it's quite versatile."

"That's remarkable."

Goiyo's admiration was entirely genuine.

"Shall I teach you?"

"Pardon? Teach me what?"

"Magic. It's not as difficult as you might think."

"I couldn't possibly—"

"Have you ever tried?"

No. The word came out small, uncertain, retreating beneath her breath.

Magic was not a path one could take on a whim. The cost of acquiring even a spellbook, let alone finding a teacher, was astronomical—and more than any other discipline, it demanded talent, which meant the money spent offered no guarantee of anything in return.

Like most children, Goiyo had once been curious about magic, when she was very small.

It was not as though money had been lacking in the world she had grown up in. The Rubiette dukedom was not a poor house, and while her mother was alive, there had also been the support of House Balverdi—her mother's family, the great merchant house from Topeche.

But little Goiyo Rubiette had not had the courage to bear the weight of such a wager.

She might spend a fortune and come away with nothing to show for it. No talent. No achievement. Nothing. That fear had crushed her small curiosity underfoot before it could become anything at all.

After that, she had never allowed herself to want magic. But then, wanting things had never been a habit of Goiyo Rubiette's—not only where magic was concerned.

She supposed that would not change now. That there was nothing left for her to want.

The one person she had ever wanted badly enough to insist on keeping—

Goiyo swallowed the bitter shape of that thought.

"You won't know whether you have talent until you try."

"But finding a teacher separately seems like such a bother. I'm not that interested, really."

"Separately, she says—a rather unkind word. When the most capable mage in the world is standing right before her."

Something about his shameless self-congratulation lifted the grey weight pressing on her mood. Not bothering to dispute his claim, Goiyo asked: "Aren't you busy?"

"I like being busy. If I become busier still, that is no hardship for me."

"Then I'll give it some thought."

"You won't regret it."

"Thank you for the offer—most capable mage in the world."

Think nothing of it, Entzi replied, slightly flustered to find himself not contradicted.

The mansion was large—not so large as the Imperial Palace, but large enough that evening was nearly upon them before they had seen all of it.

After receiving Kolave Peroto's introduction, Goiyo entered the dining room thoroughly spent.

She sat down straight-backed, without permitting a trace of exhaustion to show.

As though banishment awaited anything less than grand and imposing, the dining table was, predictably, absurdly long. Goiyo could barely make out Entzi's face from where she sat, though perhaps the distance was less troubling from his end.

Dishes appeared along the table in succession. For all that Entzi's tastes ran toward the lavish without apology, he apparently had no love of waste: the table was well-appointed but not overwhelmed.

'At least in this we agree.'

Goiyo cut into the steak before her. Something about pressing food into an exhausted, hollow body made her feel marginally more alive.

Entzi, cutting his own steak with equal elegance from the far end, spoke across the length of the table.

"Is the food to your liking?"

"Yes, well enough."

"Come to think of it, I forgot to ask. Is there anything you can't eat? Meat, seafood, noodles—anything at all?"

"No, I can eat everything."

"No ingredients you particularly dislike?"

"Nothing I can't eat."

"What about things you like?"

"Things I can't eat—"

Goiyo blinked, her sentence trailing away.

She had no allergies to speak of. When she ate, she ate to fill a void—nothing more than that.

She had been answering his questions as honestly as she knew how—nothing I dislike, nothing I can't eat—and yet across the impossible length of that table, where she could not read his expression, Entzi seemed somehow frustrated.

A brief silence settled between them.

Then Entzi exhaled—a long, deliberate breath—pushed back his chair, rose, and walked toward her with unhurried strides. Before Goiyo could ask what he was doing, he had crossed the full length of the dining table, pulled out the chair beside her, and sat. Even that looked elegant. It was, however, a rather considerable breach of dining etiquette.

Entzi, who had never once in Goiyo's observation ceased to be impeccably aristocratic, prompted her to blink at him in mild bewilderment.

"Some things about a person, I suppose, can't be helped."

"Entzi?"

"I could be more aristocratic in bearing than anyone alive, I'm quite certain—and yet here I am, apparently, all the same."

He crossed one leg over the other, propped his chin on the edge of the table, and laughed—the angle of it sending a few strands of hair loose to fall across his face.

Looking up at her from that position, his voice low:

"Am I being terribly rude, my lady?"

"Not terribly. Only a little."

"That's a relief."

The sheer ease of him drew an unwilling smile from her.

"If you don't enjoy food, it explains why you're so thin. What do you like, then—outside of food?"

"Outside of food—I'm not sure I've ever really thought about it."

"What about things you dislike?"

"Ah. Things that are too showy—I don't particularly like those."

The first answer she had actually been able to give. Goiyo brought out her preferences haltingly, groping for words she rarely had occasion to use.

They were unfamiliar words. They did not come smoothly. But Entzi did not appear to mind, and that made it easier to continue.

"Things with bright colors or heavy fragrances—roses, for instance, that kind of thing. I don't think I like them much. Perfume as well. The fashions lately have been rather overpowering; it's been a little wearing."

She had avoided showy dress and heavy scent because she had never wanted to draw attention. After her mother's death, the aversion to being noticed had deepened into something more visceral, and the habit had entrenched itself further.

She had simply lived that way, drifting quietly through her days, and then one afternoon she had looked back and found that the rose had become the flower she liked least of all.

That was simply how things had happened.

As she spoke, a subtle shift moved through Entzi's expression—something she could not quite name. She noticed it.

"What is it?"

"By any chance—is this your way of saying, indirectly, that you dislike me?"