The Promise

Fortunately, things never got as far as anyone calling the police.

Given Kenneth’s line of work, calling them wouldn’t have done much good anyway, but what really settled it was how quickly he came round.

That didn’t mean he looked well, of course. Anyone could see how pale he was when he came to.

“…”

“…”

For a while a strange standoff held. Noelle kept stealing glances to read the room, while Sicella and Kenneth sat trembling with the color drained from their faces.

Having the Empire’s strongest Knight call at the house in person was enough to make a man faint dead away all on its own, and on top of that, this was a household where father and son both worked at trades they couldn’t hold their heads up over. So if Kenneth and Sicella were both on the verge of losing their minds, that was fair enough…

“It is Sharelpin’s Tears, the signature work of a winery that regularly supplies the Imperial Palace.”

“…”

“…I prepared it because I heard you were fond of drink, but is it not to your liking?”

Liking had nothing to do with it.

…Couldn’t you buy a house in the capital’s busy quarter with just one of these?

That was the thought running through Kenneth’s head as he took it in trembling hands.

Her carrying in a thing like this and calling it a visiting gift was already enough to send his sense of reality drifting off into the far distance, but more absurd still was the way Noelle handed it over.

Why is this person the one in a flap…?

One look at her manner and the thought came all on its own, because she was anxiously reading his reactions as if she were the lesser party here.

“I am always imposing on Aiden, so I do hope you will accept it without feeling obliged—”
“Th-That is, ah, if I may ask in all reverence, what could the Lionhearted possibly have to do with our boy…”

That he managed to force his voice out at all was likely because her manner so clearly had something to do with his son.

“Yes. Aiden and I have dealings of one sort and another.”
“And, if I might ask, just what sort of relationship would that—”
“We are to be married.”
“Daaaad—!!”

“…”

Kenneth fainted a second time, and it took him even longer to wake than the first.

When he did, his face was paler still, and he spoke as though his breath might give out at any moment, a sight that set even Noelle squirming uneasily…

“Begging your pardon, but might that be some manner of joke on the Lionhearted’s part—”
“Noelle is quite enough, Father.”

“…”

Kenneth was plainly exerting superhuman willpower not to faint a third time, so out of consideration for him Noelle swiftly moved on to an explanation: how she had come to abduct Aiden, and to what end.

It seemed to do some good, because once Kenneth had heard her out, he drew a few deep breaths and managed an answer.

“…Did that kid really have something special enough to land a role like that?”

“…”

“Seems like you’d have had plenty of better options…?”

“…”

Family or not, objectivity on that scale went past cool-headed and straight into frozen solid.

Still, that question at least was one she could answer for certain.

“There were none.”

“…”

“If anything, it is always Aiden who helps me. So much so that I would like us to stay together from here on.”

“…”

This person. Just who in the world is she talking about.

That was exactly what the expression on Kenneth’s face said.

To put it in order.

“…So, Dame Noelle, His Highness the Prince is courting you.”
“Yes.”
“And to give yourself a pretext to turn him down, you singled out my boy for a sham marriage.”
“Yes.”
“And my boy is holding that spot just fine against His Highness the Prince…?”
“Exactly so.”

“…”

Irreverent as it was, the impression that came to Kenneth the moment he’d heard the whole story was this.

That boy should have gone looking for a place as a live-in son-in-law instead of a con man’s trade…!

Then there’d have been no telling how big he might have made it…!

“U-Um…”

Sicella, though, had plainly come away with an entirely different impression.

“C-Could I ask just one thing.”

She had grasped by instinct how great a person stood before her, so she got the words out haltingly. Anyone would, in front of someone who could decide with a single word whether they lived or died.

“Yes. Anything you like.”
“Then when is Oppa coming back?”

“…”

Noelle’s gaze passed once over Sicella. The girl was quaking from head to toe, enough to call to mind a trembling little hamster.

Even so.

“…I do not think I can tell you he will be back any time soon. I am sorry.”
“N-Nothing bad is going to happen to Oppa, is it?”

A little child, with all her strength, wringing the courage out of her whole body to speak to someone who held the power of life and death over her.

“I-Is Oppa being taken away because he did something wrong?”

Out of worry for her family.

“…Miss Sicella.”
“I know Dad and Oppa both do bad things.”

Tears welled thick in Sicella’s eyes, but she barely managed to go on.

“B-But that’s, all because of me. They both only do it because they have to…”

“…”

“If, if something has gone wrong because of that, then I’ll take the punishment with them, so… s-so please, the two of them—”
“Miss Sicella.”

Noelle cut her off short there and leaned far forward toward her. The girl flinched back, and Noelle carefully held out a hand to her. Ki began to pulse at her fingertips.

“I promise you, on all my honor.”

Before long, the ki she had drawn out traced a single path and set something afloat.

“Aiden will come back home to you, without fail.”

A pinwheel.

Noelle had concentrated pure-white ki into it as though working a jewel, and it sat up on her hand, scattering a lustrous color in every direction. Just watching it turn slowly, with particles of light wafting off all around it, was enough on its own to seize the eye.

“—Will you accept this as the token of that promise?”

Sicella, on the verge of tears, sniffled and took it in her hands. Her eyes glittered with wonder at a sight she had never once seen in all her life. However precocious her talk was for her years, a child that age was still a child, it seemed. Aiden’s advice, that anything a child would like would do, seemed to have paid off.

“Will you trust me, Miss Sicella?”

Still sniffling, Sicella quietly nodded.

“…Then, while you’re at it, could you put it in a written contract?”

“…”

“I-I read in a book that it only has legal binding force if you put it in writing—”

…Even so, after all.

Next to others her age she was precocious, that much seemed certain.

At any rate, thanks to the mood having been loosened that way, the conversation that followed was going along far more calmly than before.

Part of it was surely that, with Sicella sent out for a while, conditions allowed for a far more… ‘serious’ exchange.

“That girl adores her oppa. It’s quite something, how you calmed her down in one go.”
“…Someone who was like an older sister to me always used to do it.”

Noelle answered Kenneth with a wry smile.

It was a trick the Lord Protector had often shown her in the past. She’d given Noelle one again and again to lift her spirits, back when Noelle was young and unpolished and forever frustrated by her training.

“Let’s work hard. I won’t give up on you either, right to the end.”
“Got it?”

A pinwheel made with a supernatural power, handed over whenever anything happened and always called the token of a promise. Now that Teresa was dead, there wasn’t a single one of them left, but the sight of her handing them over was lodged deep in the core of Noelle’s heart.

“…She sounds like she was a good person.”

“…”

Kenneth had said it hesitantly. Instead of answering, Noelle bowed her head a little and tipped her glass, and before long she quietly changed the subject.

“The reason I came here in the first place is that there is one thing I wished to ask.”
“Sorry?”

It was a simple question. What was the ‘source’ of Aiden Kellermain? What in the world had that man’s life been up to the age of fifteen, a span that had evaporated out of every record?

“I don’t know.”

Kenneth’s answer was just as simple.

“That boy and Sicella both… the truth is, they’re kids I picked up off the street. I’ve never once pried into their pasts. I rather think that’s why we get along so well.”

“…”

…So even after coming all this way, she wasn’t going to hear anything about that side of things.

Noelle was drawing her brows together at the thought when Kenneth went on evenly.

“Still, I can make a guess.”
“…Sorry?”
“That boy’s awfully devoted to his family, isn’t he? More precisely, he tries to look after everyone inside the ‘fence’ he’s drawn for himself the same way.”

“…”

It was an exact way of putting it. Kenneth and Sicella, whom he already called family, went without saying, but by now she was growing used to the sight of him rolling up both sleeves over the affairs of Noelle or Katya too, though they stood far further from him than those two did. As though it were work he absolutely had to do himself.

“Come to think of it, it’s a bit odd.”

Noelle’s eyes narrowed.

“Might I ask in what sense you mean that?”

She was starting to feel put out, wondering whether he meant it badly, when Kenneth waved a hand and went on.

“Please don’t misunderstand me, Dame Noelle. I love my son. And I’m certain my son loves his family too. It’s only… once that boy loses his head, he can’t see anything else, can he.”

“…”

“Strictly speaking, it looks almost like an instinctive craving. Or even like he feels it’s his duty to do such things.”

There was no refuting that. Noelle nodded and stroked her chin while Kenneth went on with a sigh.

“A while back there was a nasty brat who used to torment Sicella. Tall, strong too. Could’ve handled a weakling like Aiden one-handed.”

“…”

A weakling?

That person?

…If it was back then, that could well be so.

She kept her mouth shut with that thought in mind, and Kenneth went on evenly.

“Even with a gap that wide… the second the brat said one nasty word to Sicella, he shot straight out and headbutted him, I’m told. The idiot.”

“…”

“Naturally, one punch and his jaw was shattered. The hospital said he wasn’t to move for a month at the very least. No strenuous movement, period. Said he could die if things went wrong. And do you know what that boy did then?”
“What did he do?”
“The very next day he strapped on a bib and went to headbutt the one who’d broken his jaw. To tell him to leave Sicella alone.”

“…”

“That’s just the sort he is. Clearly not normal, is he?”
“…That is true.”

Noelle conceded it sourly, and Kenneth went on with a bitter smile.

“Even just from that, you can roughly work out that boy’s past.”
“…Meaning?”
“That boy must have lost someone, once.”

And horribly, too, beyond any doubt. So horribly that having to protect the people around him registered as something close to an obsession.

Instinct is a kind of craving, craving comes from lack, and the greatest lack of all comes from loss.

“If that’s it, it’d explain why that boy goes as far as he does.”

“…”

Noelle lowered her eyes and sank into thought, and another sentence fell to her.

“He’s a quiet sort by nature, so he won’t go out of his way to stand out unless something happens… but I’d be grateful if you could keep him from getting caught up in anything like that.”

Kenneth’s voice fell heavily, as though he were asking it in earnest.

“Because at times like that, there’s no telling what he’ll do.”

…And, somewhere.

Aiden Kellermain was plainly proving that assessment in real time.

“What did you just say?”

A princess of the Holy Kingdom, sixth in the line of succession to the throne: Layla Bellode Craven spoke in a voice of pure incredulity.

Sixth in line or not, a royal was one of a nation’s most important figures, a person to be received as a guest of the highest honor wherever she went.

Which was to say.

“You heard me perfectly well, so don’t go pretending you didn’t, Princess.”

that, sent to another country as part of a ‘delegation’ as she was,

she was not of a standing to hear words like these lightly.

“Apologize, unless you’d like me to pound you flat.”

“…”

“I’ll give you five seconds.”

…Had Noelle seen it for herself, it would have been a scene to make her chew over the rule that nobody knows a family like family.