Youngest 152

152
‘And strangely, Father doesn’t seem to be in a good mood…’

As we walked down the corridor, I glanced up at his composed face.

‘Did something really happen on his business trip?’

I tried to puzzle it out, but nothing specific came to mind. I didn’t even know what the business trip had been about in the first place.

We headed upstairs to a lounge above the banquet hall.

Perhaps because the presentation was set to last for quite some time, each family seemed to have been allotted a room.

Click.

As the large door closed, I felt as though we had entered a world entirely removed from the bustling banquet hall.

The room was filled with only quiet and solitude.

‘Father… he’s not quite himself.’

I sat quietly on the sofa, watching him light the lamp.

‘When I speak to him, he seems just like usual.’

But if we sat together in silence, a strange sense of unease crept over me.

Was it just my imagination?

“Oh, by the way, I brought you a present on my way here.”

Father brightened the room a bit and sat right beside me.

“Huh? A present?”

“Tongtong macarons.”

“Tongtong macarons? Really?”

“You’ve heard of them?”

My eyes widened a little.

I’d heard of them from Sortie, who knew all the best dessert places.

“Yeah! They’re supposed to be really famous!”

“…So it wasn’t just an exaggeration, then.”

“What do you mean? Anyway, where is it?”

“Over there, near my overcoat…”

Father pointed to a small attached dressing room in one corner of the room.

I sprang to my feet.

“I’ll go get it!”

“No, I’ll—”

“I already stomped all over your feet! You should rest, Father!”

This much is nothing!

I dashed off to the dressing room. I quickly spotted what was unmistakably his large jacket.

It had been hung up, but seemed to have fallen, pinning a large box underneath it.

A pink box tied with a blue ribbon.

Even with my short career as a dessert connoisseur, I could tell.

That was a box of Tongtong macarons!

I hurried over and grabbed the jacket. With all its jingling decorations, it was heavier than I’d expected.

“Urgh. Is it because he’s so big? Why is even his overcoat so huge and heavy?”

In the end, I gave the jacket a sharp tug.

Maybe that was a mistake.

Something shot out of the jacket pocket. And then—

Crash!

“…Huh?”

With a sharp shattering sound, something painfully familiar broke to pieces.

---

Leviathan let out a silent sigh and buried his face in his hands.

His fingers trembled faintly.

‘Calm down. Don’t let it show.’

Rubian was an observant child.

Just as after that incident in the carriage, he didn’t want to weigh her down with his anxieties.

Especially not today, the day of the child’s presentation, the day they’d reunited after ten days apart.

‘She looks so happy.’

He had a mountain of questions he wanted to ask, but he summoned patience from the very bottom of his soul.

‘I’ll ask after it’s all over.’

At least, after Ruby’s presentation. Then, carefully, one thing at a time.

‘Yes. There could be some misunderstanding. She still looks different, is still a different age…’

He recited by heart the details he knew of the fugitive mage.

Red eyes. A mage in possession of great power, appearing about ten years old.

Before, such facts had served as powerful evidence against linking Ruby with the fugitive mage.

‘Could Ruby really have hidden only her gender?’

That thought turned everything upside down.

“…Damn it.”

Leviathan clenched his teeth. His insides already felt burnt to ash, filling him with a bitter haze.

Don’t show it.

It might not be true.

‘If I speak with Rubian, I might get a different answer.’

That faint sliver of hope was the only thing keeping him sane.

He felt as though he were someone standing, eyes wide open, before some distant black storm.

Then it happened.

Crash!

Startled by the sound of something shattering, Leviathan leapt to his feet.

He hurried into the dressing room.

“Ruby!”

“Uh… Father, I’m sorry…”

In the middle of the small dressing room, Rubian sat on the floor, looking up at him awkwardly.

His heart leapt into his throat at the sight of the shards of clear glass scattered around the child.

“Are you alright? Did you get hurt?”

“I-I’m okay, but… this… the glass bottle…”

Rubian’s voice was a jumble of confused words as she pointed to the floor.

Leviathan quickly lifted her and set her down away from the broken glass.

Even the neatly stacked macaron boxes were toppled, their ribbons undone and contents spilled everywhere.

“Are you sure you’re not hurt? No cuts?”

“Y-yeah. I just pulled your coat a bit too hard… I never dreamed something like a glass bottle would be there…”

Her mumbled voice trailed off. Rubian kept glancing at the pieces of glass on the floor.

A glass bottle tied with a blue ribbon.

It was something that had helped Leviathan during the war.

He’d forgotten he’d tucked it away in an inner pocket.

“I’m sorry…”

Rubian hunched her shoulders, apologizing.

“Don’t apologize. It’s enough for me that you’re not hurt.”

“O-okay. But this glass bottle…”

“It was mine, but it’s alright.”

Leviathan swept the shards together with his foot and straightened up the area.

It was a possession he had never been able to throw out.

Yet now that it had come to this, he found he didn’t even know why he’d clung to it for so long. The thought that he might have hurt Rubian by holding on to something so pointless left him cold.

‘But… where did that ribbon go?’

The blue ribbon that had been tied around the glass bottle.

He looked around and saw tangled ribbons scattered at Rubian’s feet.

All mixed together with those from the macaron box.

“Ruby, would you hand me the blue ribbon under your feet…”

Leviathan started to say, then shut his mouth.

‘She won’t know which one I mean, if I put it like that.’

He was about to correct himself when—

“Oh, this one?”

Rubian unerringly picked up the very ribbon that had been tied to the glass bottle and held it out to him.

Not a moment’s hesitation.

Almost as if…

“……”

As if it were a ribbon long familiar to her.

As if she’d known from the start that this was the ribbon wrapped around the shattered bottle…

Perhaps she had simply seen the ribbon in the instant the bottle broke.

But… that ribbon…

Wheeeeeen—

A ringing droned in his ears.

He couldn’t speak.

“Father…?”

Bewildered by Leviathan’s silence, Rubian seemed to step forward.

Beeeep-beeep-beeep!

From outside came the short blare of a trumpet and a professor’s cheerful voice.

“Now, it’s time for the final tea party! Camp participants, please gather at the lake garden!”

“Oh, I have to go!”

The child spun on her heel.

“Sorry for breaking your bottle, Father! I’ll call the maid for you—hurry up and change your shoes and come!”

He stared blankly after her as she hurried out the door.

Left alone, Leviathan looked down at the pitiful remnant of ribbon in his hand.

The reason he’d tried to correct himself was not complicated.

The ribbons from the macaron box scattered around Rubian were all blue as well.

“What’s this? Goodness. The ribbon is stained with blood…”

“There must have been a lot of splattering.”

An ordinary child would never have picked up a bloodstained ribbon from among so many blue ribbons.

“…Rubian.”

His fist clenched tight.

“This…”

In the end, he could only fall to his knees.

“In what way is this blue…”

A ribbon stained with blood.

Long ago, it had lost its original blue color, stained now a dark, purplish red.

His head drooped helplessly. A groan, thick with pain, escaped him at last.

The storm that had come upon him was vast and overwhelming, cruel enough to upend his entire world.

Rubian had been in that war.

My child.

Right in the heart of that hell.

Aiding me in secret.