SN Chapter 38

Rikardis and Nathan both sighed deeply.

Someone with sense had apparently stepped in—someone who read the room and thought ahead—and stopped whatever might have followed. Rikardis had never summoned her. Diez had lied to send the oblivious knight on her way.

"So, when I was getting away from that place——"

"Still not finished?"

Rikardis looked rather done with the whole thing. She had been away from his side for less than half an hour. He could not begin to imagine what she had managed to get herself into in that window of time. Rosaline gave a nod and pressed on.

"I heard Prince Diez say to Prince Haqaev, 'This is a message from Elpydion.'"

Rikardis laughed—a forced sound, too loud. His hand raked roughly through the hair fallen across his face. The room's atmosphere sharpened like an ice pick.

Rosaline assembled the picture. He had carried a message from Elpydion—Rikardis's enemy, the First Prince—directly to Haqaev. That Diez would then act in Rikardis's favor was not something she could count on.

She found herself picturing him, without meaning to. Diez's hand, warm and unhurried, lifting a petal from her face. His golden eyes catching sunlight.

'I was worried about you, Rosaline.'

His voice had been soft enough to dissolve. The warmth in it was easy to read. And so this made even less sense. Diez was good to her. He was not good to Rikardis. Good person—on her side. Bad person—on the other side. The line in her mind was firm and clearly drawn. But Diez's movements were too difficult to classify. Was he her enemy?

"Contacting him on the very first day of arrival—quite pressed for time. Anything else you heard, Dame Rosaline?"

Rosaline recalled the conversation that had grown quieter and quieter before the field crickets swallowed it whole. She had borrowed a wild bird's hearing, and every word between the two men had reached her clean and whole.

"This is a message from Elpydion."

"Oh, my. Whatever business could he have with a lowly son of Balta?"

"'A combination of magic and poison—he claims to have known nothing of it.'"

"To be precise—the poison's called 'Fragment.'"

"'A combination of magic and poison—he claims to have known nothing of it. They joined hands for each other's futures, and yet he had believed they had grown into true allies.' Those were his words."

Haqaev laughed. The 'true allies' part seemed to strike him as particularly funny. Diez pressed on without concern. The voices continued to fade.

"'What great work could one build on a poorly stacked foundation of trust? Just as I have trusted you, I hope you will show me the same trust in return......' Those were his words."

"How elaborately he twists them. Isn't the point just whether there's an antidote?"

"Yes."

Haqaev fell briefly silent. Low, pleased laughter was all that filled the pause. The voices were fading. Rosaline pricked up her ears and strained with everything she had.

"The antidote—"

With those last laughter-edged words from Haqaev, what remained of the sound went completely silent.

"None."

Chirr... chirr. The crickets owned the night.

"Danger, Your Highness!"

Rosaline came flying in from somewhere.

Damn. Rikardis cursed through his teeth and braced. He had meant to catch her—she was sailing toward him like a butterfly—but her arrow-swift speed was more than he could meet, and he ended up flat on his back. A bee drifted past the two of them on the ground. Raymond, face perfectly blank, raised a hand and shooed it away. Silence.

'She's fired. The moment we're back in Illavénia, cut.'

Rikardis lay pinned beneath Rosaline and shook.

This particular brand of guard duty had been going on since the previous night. Rosaline was confused. It was the strange magical energy blanketing this enormous palace—not from one person, not from one place. It rolled in from every direction at once.

Eyes and ears that missed nothing. Animal instinct that caught the scent of killing intent. The entity's power to read magic. Everything that had once served her so well had turned against her. She could not warn anyone. She could not run. She had been told: not unless they attacked first. She was permitted only to be a shield.

She had begun to come apart. The world visible to her eyes and the world read by her senses were merging. Flowers and swords, threaded through alien magic. She could not tell at a glance what was the danger. Following her instincts, she had begun to treat everything as a threat.

A passing servant. A palace cat. Flying insects. Even Itserion and Knight Captain Stas.

When Rosaline stepped into his path and held her ground, Stas wore an expression like he had run out of words. But this was still better than laziness. Too much vigilance was preferable to too little—she was clearly trying, even if she was lacking, and he found something endearing in the effort, so he had given her a pat on the shoulder and let it go.

Today was the result of that complacent judgment.

"Danger, Your Highness!"

A cat sprawled across the grass, licking its front paw.

"Your Highness—behind me!"

A palace servant eating at some distance. They appeared to choke at Rosaline's cry and coughed at considerable length.

"Move back!"

A leaf on the wind.

Itserion, who had been quietly growing exasperated by the ongoing over-protection, gave up entirely at this point.

Rosaline's arm shot straight out and blocked Rikardis's path.

"Stop—please, stop, Dame Rosaline!"

He shouted at the back of her head. She didn't appear to hear him. She was intent on prying up the protruding stone at his feet, and she appeared genuinely sorry about not having managed it yet. Rikardis's fury reached the top of his skull. He found himself wondering what he had become. He was neither a ninety-year-old elder nor a newborn infant—yet this knight——

Rikardis took hold of the back of her uniform collar and hauled her upright. Her gaze stayed on the stone. She still looked genuinely aggrieved about the unfinished business.

"This——!"

He caught himself. Took a breath. Collected himself with tremendous effort.

If it were anyone else, he would have called it harassment. But this was Rosaline. All of it came from wanting to protect him. He understood. He did—and yet. Too much. Far too much.

"I have eyes, Dame Rosaline. I can manage a protruding stone on my own, so just... stop."

Rikardis ground his teeth. He wanted to tell her to disappear from his sight entirely but couldn't bring himself to say it. A few minutes ago, unable to bear it any longer, he had given her a break and forcibly sent her away—only for her to reappear like a gust of wind the moment a single honeybee appeared. The time spent away and the distance covered seemed to operate in direct proportion to the intensity of her return.

She couldn't focus on the conversation at all, eyes sweeping the surroundings in constant, rapid passes. Her vigilance was at an extreme.

Because this was a foreign country? Because it was the land of an old enemy? Because the Knight Captain's words had brought the danger back into focus? Or because there was something only she knew?

He could only guess.

Rikardis turned his steps back toward his room. If he stayed out much longer, he was going to die of high blood pressure caused by Rosaline before he ever got to see Prince Haqaev. Rosaline swept the area around her with an uneasy look and quickly fell in behind his retreating figure.

Rikardis never slept deeply.

Even after days and nights without sleep, the mere sound of rain tapping the window might wake him. The candle going out was enough. Carelessness led directly to crisis. Crisis came with no regard for personal circumstances. Rikardis had understood this from a young age.

The result was that even in sleep, he had learned to hold his unconscious at a level where he could dimly perceive it. Someone else might call it an illness. Rikardis was satisfied with the arrangement.

He felt the air around the room change—almost imperceptibly. Something cut through the air that had been flowing quietly, and a breath came pressing in from elsewhere. The soft sound of cloth. Faint, carrying what might have been the smell of grass.

Someone had entered.

Rikardis read the presence while still hazily submerged in sleep.

......

He hadn't heard a window or door open. A visitor through an unknown passage, then. And yet—he felt no alarm.

He lay still. Eyes closed.

"Rosaline."

"Yes, Your Highness."

A calm voice reached his ear. Rosaline, too, was entirely unsurprised—her tone natural, like continuing a conversation that had briefly paused. Rikardis opened his eyes, soft with sleep. A dark silhouette stood tall at his bedside. The room's dim light fell on her face. The candlelight rippled inside her eyes.

Rikardis straightened the shirt that had come undone in his sleep.

"How did you get in? I didn't hear the door."

"There was a passage through the ceiling."

"The Balta men who made it and the Dame who found her way through it. Quite the remarkable talents, both of them."

"I tried the window first, but Sir Pardickt caught me——"

I was scolded. He read the words she hadn't finished. Rikardis, hazy with sleep, smiled faintly. Even on this dark night, his guard knights appeared to be performing their duties admirably—if they were capable of holding the window against her——

He did not ask why she had come. He did not ask what she had come to do. The image of her all-day extraordinary guard duty was something he could not have forgotten even if he'd tried.