Editor 153

Unconcealed passion radiated from within Katarina.

Celestes, who had been leaning at an angle against the window frame with her arms folded, showed no reaction to her mother’s reproach.

“Do you think your grandmother and I went through all that suffering just so you could waste it on some reckless game of playing soldier? It took three generations to build this fortune, but it only takes one to waste it all!”

It had been revealed by the Internal Security Bureau’s investigation that Chel was the financial source for the private soldier training in the Kishion estate.

Though this information had not yet been made public, the well-connected Katarina had heard it ahead of others and had blocked every channel through which rumors might spread.

When her daughter suddenly started going out, Katarina had let it slide, thinking Chel was always a peculiar child and she herself was busy with business. That was her mistake.

Worse, the one who had helped with that damned affair was Sophia Lefebvre, the capable accountant whom Katarina trusted.

If things had gone slightly wrong, they could have been accused of treason, so even the bold Katarina could not remain calm.

“Ha, how did you entice that cold-blooded accountant? My daughter and my confidante were plotting treason behind my back, and I failed to notice—what a mistake!”

“Entice? Jophie just wanted to exercise her authority to send the person she wanted to the House of Commons.”

Smack!

Unable to contain herself, Katarina slapped her daughter’s cheek.

Chel could easily have avoided the move of someone who had never trained in martial arts, but she let herself be struck, thinking it might ease her mother’s anger.

But Katarina’s hand was harsh.

The diamond set prominently in her ring scratched a long line down Chel’s cheek. Soon, blood welled up.

“Does first-degree treason feel like a joke to you?! Testify that you were swept up by friendship with that red-haired swordswoman and made a bad decision. I’ll find you a guarantor. So far, Count Kishion is testifying that everything is his responsibility, so it can be smoothed over.”

Katarina had built close relationships with Albion’s senators. She had done them favors and fed them money, and now was the time to reap what she had sown.

If Chel nodded, Katarina would use every means to clear her daughter’s name, no matter what happened to Isiel or Arthur.

“You know, Mother. I can’t do that. That’s the price and weight of my honor, and it’s my share to bear.”

“Ha, honor! Did you just say honor? You have to be alive to have honor. What honor remains in the seven royal heads of the Etenzel family hung in Liberté Square? Talk to me about honor in front of my first husband’s corpse, who was hanged from a streetlamp!”

Katarina was already twenty-five when she left Carolinger. Marie’s son-in-law and Chel’s short-lived father was Katarina’s second husband.

Chel had never heard the details of what had happened in her mother’s life. Her upright face froze in shock.

“Mother…”

Fiercely agitated, Katarina hurriedly unlocked her desk drawer. In her excitement, the key kept missing, and she fumbled several times.

Clatter. Click.

Pulling out a bundle of pamphlets from the drawer, Katarina threw them onto Chel’s lap.

They were declarations and monthly newsletters from the suffrage movement published by the Violet Club.

“Do you feel like you’ve become someone because you print these wretched pamphlets with tutors and play at social activism with naïve girls? If you didn’t have wealth, you’d be no different from other exiles’ daughters—teaching Carolinger to children while watching the head maid’s mood in some nouveau riche’s back room!”

Her shoulders, exposed above her black silk dress, heaved with quick breaths. Katarina caught her breath and brushed back her disheveled hair.

“In the end, what moves the world is only status and wealth. It was true a thousand years ago, and it will be true a thousand years from now. Want to play politics? Pick the second or third son of a decent family, give him your surname! Whether it’s voting rights or a title, once you marry and get older, you can have them. Why are you making such a mess?”

Katarina’s point was valid.

A married woman over 35 with more than 100,000 dinars in assets could have the right to vote; a married woman over 40 with over a million dinars in assets could, in principle, run for office.

Chel lacked nothing in wealth, so whoever her spouse, she could easily gain those rights through marriage.

But that was also a path Chel could not choose.

It had only been ten years since women had been able to exercise independent property rights, and most truly wealthy women were nobles, who had neither the right to vote nor to run for office in the House of Commons.

Even the hereditary seats in the House of Lords were usually passed to sons-in-law rather than daughters.

“So is there a woman who’s become a House of Commons member? Not a single one yet! Even you, Mother, before the Property Law of ’82 passed, lobbied in every way to keep the hotel under your name! I don’t want to live wrapped in lies, nor become something I’m not. I chose someone who had the possibility to carry out my will and made a [pact], and that meant sharing life and death under my faith.”

“You, don’t tell me you made a [pact] with the Third Prince?”

Chel did not answer.

Her silence became the answer.

Katarina’s lips trembled in shock.

“…You’re insane.”

Katarina, who had pressed her forehead in anguish, quietly stood and approached Chel.

Among middle-aged women, she was tall, but still shorter than Chel.

“When I lost your sister, even my tears dried up.”

The empress of the de Neige Hotel, dressed in a black dress, stretched out her graceful arms and embraced her only remaining child. As if seeking reconciliation.

With the same eyes and same hair color, the resemblance between mother and daughter was striking, making their difference in attitude all the more pronounced.

Brushing the nape of her daughter’s hair, now cut short like a soldier’s, Katarina spoke in a trembling voice.

“You are the only miracle I have left.”

Chel gently embraced her mother, who had become smaller than herself. The beautiful indigo hair, once like the midnight sky, now had strands of gray.

Click.

It happened in an instant. While hugging Chel, Katarina reached back to a cabinet and fastened a suppressor collar around her daughter’s neck.

No matter how mature Chel was, she could not beat Katarina, who had survived through turbulent times. Distracted by her mother’s shocking confession and emotional appeal, her ether was bound.

In disbelief, Chel fumbled at the metal ring around her bare neck.

A soft golden light leaked from the metal, illuminating her shirt collar. It was a Tiflaum. Chel’s face twisted.

“How could I just stand by and let the same thing happen again? Losing a child is not something to endure twice in a lifetime. Sabine, Paula. Lock this wretched girl up in the fourth-floor detention room. Don’t let her out until this is over.”

“Yes, madam.”

“By your command.”

The two sturdy maids who had been waiting outside rushed in at Katarina’s voice.

Chel shoved Katarina aside and quickly slipped between the maids. Just as she grabbed the doorknob, the maids’ strong hands seized her.

“Ah, Mother, really…!”

Before she could finish speaking, Chel’s eyes closed unnaturally. Her long, trained limbs twitched now and then.

“Sleep for a bit. We’ll talk after. Good thing I put some sleeping agent on the suppressor, just in case. She’s my daughter, but where did she get this from, really.”

Katarina slumped onto the disordered office sofa. Opening a bottle of awakening perfume, she inhaled a little, then got up again and picked up the phone.

Having secured the main culprit, the next step was cleanup.

“Yes, how have you been, Judge Cassobon? About the deposit we spoke of before, and the donation… Yes, I’d like to contribute to His Highness the Crown Prince’s guard. As a sign of my sincere loyalty and respect for the guard’s dedication. Of course. As soon as possible.”

If Melchior had drawn his sword, Katarina, trying to save her daughter, had no choice but to bow deeply.

‘Of all things, to fund private soldiers. I can’t exactly break her legs over this. This is driving me mad.’

Her cheeks and ears flushed and her heart pounded—a symptom she hadn’t felt since giving birth to Chel.

Even as she wrote letters to minimize her daughter’s charges, Katarina had to keep fanning herself with her other hand.

It truly was a terrible day.

---

An anxious day passed.

Cleio, exhausted from the prison, fell asleep as if fainting and then woke with a start.

It had been a shallow sleep, so the fatigue remained, but at least it was proof that Arthur was not under immediate threat of death, which was a relief.

He staggered to the table in his bedroom, sat down, and drank strong coffee to wake up his brain.

Seeing the terrace where Arthur, uninvited, would sometimes climb up, made him even more uneasy.

“Huuuu…”

A sigh escaped him.

He had always slept well in this world and usually had tea in the morning, so he had forgotten the feeling: the sensation of coffee’s caffeine forcibly rousing the nervous system.

‘This feels like shit. Ha.’

Gideon had not returned to Colfos but stayed at the capital mansion, commuting to the Lundain branch. It was obvious he was watching to make sure Cleio did not escape.

He was ordered to come down to the dining room for breakfast and dinner to eat with Gideon himself.

‘This is house arrest.’

Even now, his father was out at the office, but guards hired by Gideon stood outside the door. They rotated in shifts, watching 24 hours a day.

Judging by their presence, they didn’t seem like low-level swordsmen. They shadowed Cleio everywhere except the bathroom and bedroom. Even roundabout orders to let him rest didn’t work.

‘We are only following the orders of the junior baron, so please go about your business comfortably, sir.’ That was the only response he got.

In other words, ‘No matter what you say, we have to watch you, so stop trying anything.’

Cleio opened a newspaper while waiting for Behemoth, whom he had sent out in his stead, to return.

‘I need some information about what’s happening.’

Today’s main article was about the agreement between the transport union and the capital merchants’ union to shorten working hours.

Representative Gaston Fallach of the House of Commons had led the way in expressing the transport union’s views, and Speaker Benjamin Beaton sided with the small People’s United Party, which helped.

With the strike settled, Lundain was filled with early summer energy. The news articles were all peaceful. He even scanned the briefs and side articles just in case, but it was the same.

“Continental Hospitality Industry Convention in Dernier, in full swing in Lundain”

“Royal Park Botanical Garden Opens! The continent’s largest orangery! — Crowds expected on the Lotus Line this weekend”

Rustle.

The newspaper crumpled in Cleio’s hands.

There was not a single line about the Kishion estate.

He doubted whether any central newspaper reporter even knew what was happening there.

‘The entire estate has been locked down for three days, the commander of the northeastern defense force and lord of the estate is detained… Even if they can’t run a political article, shouldn’t there at least be a line about logistics being blocked or train service disrupted? What is this!’

Basically, Albion was a country with infrastructure concentrated in the capital. Printed materials were usually produced in the capital and sent out to the provinces.

‘Are northeastern newspapers any different? There’s no way to get them… In any case, unless news makes it into the national papers, it has no impact.’

You could get national papers in the provinces, but it was nearly impossible to get provincial newspapers in the capital.

The brilliance of Melchior’s media control was that, rather than silencing someone’s mouth, he simply blocked the source of information so that no one’s attention was drawn in the first place.

‘If not for the secret letter delivered to the Aser Company’s investigative department, I wouldn’t have known anything about what was going on.’

Even so, there was no reason for Gideon Aser to leak his information to the press.

Even if Cleio tried to tip off the press, he couldn’t think of a single outlet that would run an article disparaging the crown prince and his guard based on an anonymous, unfounded tip.

Tap tap.

Tok.

“Door!”

Jumping up, Cleio quickly opened the terrace door. Mot had returned.

“Mot! How did you get back so quickly?”

Camellia Hall, where Chel was locked up, was six stops away even by tram. It was not a round trip possible on a cat’s legs.

Behemoth raised his head arrogantly.

“I took the tram.”

“The tram?”

“Yes, the tram. If you wait a little away from the stop and get on the back door just before it leaves, it’s easy enough!”

It was a common tip for riding trams without a ticket. Behemoth, with an attitude of ‘what’s the harm in a little crime,’ twitched his plump snout.

“Your brilliance is beyond measure, my lord. So, did you deliver the letter to Chel?”

“I did. With my genius sense of smell, I tracked down that moody one and found her right away. You’ll have to pay dearly for making this old body crawl up to the fourth floor of Camellia Hall.”

“Once this is over, anything you want. Any wine you like, I’ll buy a whole oak barrel for you.”

“Good resolve. Hng.”