Invitation.

Gus began speaking in a hurried, halting mumble.

“Uh, your beauty is like…”

“—, —… —… —…”

“Today, my lady is… as beautiful as, well, something — and as for what that something is…”

Gus’s eyes swept rapidly across the estate.

A diamond chandelier like the Milky Way in the night sky, Aspara’s face, exotic flower arrangements that seemed plucked from paradise, Aspara’s face, beautiful oil paintings of fairies and angels on every wall, jewels of every color studding the ceiling, Aspara’s face.

“— —…”

“My lady is like…”

His eyes, which had been roving frantically as though searching for something, finally came to rest on his small bride’s face. At last, he spoke.

“—… — — ——.”

“Lady Aspara is as beautiful as Lady Aspara, he says.”

“Um… thank you?”

Having received a sentence she could make no sense of, Aspara left the table wearing a bewildered expression.

Behind her came a small, stifled sound, something like a groan escaping through a closed mouth, but Aspara, exhausted, chose to ignore it.

“Oh, my lady.”

Aspara stepped out onto the balcony where the two attendants had been. Jack set down the plate he had been eating from, and Ugli bowed at the waist in greeting.

“Having a nice time, are we?”

“Let me sit with you for a bit.”

Ugli whispered something to his lover.

“What about the castle lord?”

“I left him to himself.”

Through a gap in the balcony window, Gus’s back was faintly visible.

He was gulping down fruit punch one glass after another, and the interpreter attendant was refilling his empty cup with an expression that said he might keel over at any moment.

“Sorry to intrude on your intimate time together. I wanted to keep some distance from the party’s host, so I’ll stay here a while.”

“N-no, not at all? It was not intimate in the slightest.”

“— —. ——.”

“Take the flowers out of your hair before you talk.”

Aspara said this while looking at the nearly twenty marigolds tucked among the curls of Jack’s blond hair.

The balcony was quiet. Or rather, the murmur of the crowd still carried through the window, but the relative silence was refreshing.

When she had first arrived in the north, the stillness and solitude had felt so alien; yet after only a few weeks there, she had grown accustomed to silence. Returning to the social scene after so long, the noise was enough to drive her mad.

Before she knew it, the shadows had lengthened and the sunlight had softened, and the cool breeze felt pleasant.

A wind that was not cold was a rare thing these days.

The two attendants were whispering to each other again.

“I heard you and the castle lord had a fight? Is that why you came out?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“I don’t know what happened, but I’m sure he’s the one who was in the wrong. Still, if you leave the barbarian king alone in there, I’m worried about the other guests.”

“It’s fine — he’s so frightening that no one would dare approach him. Look for yourself.”

Aspara pushed the balcony window open slightly and pointed to the spot where Gus had been drinking just moments before.

“Oh.”

“Does that look fine to you?”

Gus was backhanding Flower across the face.

The sharp crack of skin being struck rang out, and for a few seconds the hall fell silent before erupting into murmurs.

Aspara grabbed a passing servant carrying a tray of finger food and asked:

“You — what happened?”

Slightly startled by the sudden question, the servant lowered his voice and whispered:

“Well, the barbarian king suddenly struck Lord Flower across the head in the middle of a conversation…”

So the event was exactly as it appeared, then.

Through the hall’s rising murmur, snippets of gossip drifted to her ears, things like “barbarian, as expected.” Aspara’s brow furrowed as she struggled to make sense of the situation.

“Honestly, he shouldn’t be so utterly lacking in manners.”

“I think he might very well be that utterly lacking in mann— ow!”

Ugli pinched Jack hard in the side as he tried to chime in.

Pushing through the murmuring guests, Aspara approached the gap between her current husband and her ex-husband, her face caught between worry and resolve.

“Excuse me. There seems to be some misunderstanding with my husband — might I ask what happened?”

“Ah, dear Aspara, please step back carefully. I am concerned you might be bitten by this dog.”

Flower turned his gaze to Aspara, his expression a blend of excitement and superiority.

“It seems your husband’s true nature has finally revealed itself. A barbarian’s instincts cannot be helped, after all.”

“—…! —— —!”

Aspara frowned and stared at the northern castle lord, who was catching his breath like a beast that had been sprinting.

That she could not read his expression was especially maddening today.

The frustration was mutual.

Aspara had barely left her seat when that man approached.

Flower.

As the master of the estate, he had been managing the hall until the event’s star, his wife and child, made their entrance. The sight of this lanky beanpole strutting around with his nose in the air, grinning and chattering away, had not pleased Gus in the slightest.

So when Flower approached him, Gus had simply intended to brush him off with polite disinterest.

Until the man opened his mouth.

“The master of the house asks how married life is treating you.”

“Without trouble.”

“— — —— —.”

Flower looked Gus up and down with a hmm sort of expression, then spoke as if he already knew everything.

“— — —— — — ——.”

“What a lucky man you are — I know quite well what a fine woman Miss Aspara is. When she was mine, she was always working so devotedly to be a shining ornament at my side. I do worry how someone who loved theater and the arts so much might be faring in a northern castle, he says.”

“Yours.”

The northern castle lord glared at the man with open displeasure. The earrings that glinted and flashed every time Flower smiled grated on his eyes.

The poor interpreter attendant asked cautiously:

“Er, how shall I respond?”

“…”

“— — ———— — —— ——— ————.”

“Ah — Miss Aspara may be a woman with certain, shall we say, deficiencies, but I am still quite concerned for her as her former husband. If she shows any signs of longing for the past, I do hope you will not hold it against her, he says.”

The master of the estate plowed ahead without waiting for a reply.

“Bad taste.”

“— — —.”

“If you think about it, we’re hardly complete strangers, so please don’t be so cold. We civilized folk understand the gods, and therefore know that divorce is a profanity. How could one ever fully forsake a husband once taken? So says, um, Lord Flower…”

“Congratulations on the birth of your child.”

Gus cut him off. Pointedly, as though noting that the timing of the old couple’s divorce and the new couple’s heir did not quite add up. Ha ha, Flower laughed, and the interpreter relayed his response:

“Well, whether it’s something to celebrate… Since it’s just between you and me — that child was more something that happened because I was helplessly ensnared by a villainess’s wiles. You know how men are, no matter how old they get, they’re as pure as children at heart — once tempted by something dark, they’re so easily led astray. In fact, for precisely that reason, I miss her all the more.”

The interpreter hesitated to finish the sentence. Flower gestured impatiently, as if to say why aren’t you relaying this already.

“—The more time I spend with my new wife, the more I realize what a foolish thing it was to let Miss Aspara go. So I am working to earn her forgiveness now. I think it would be nice if she came back and looked after our child, you… see.”

A low, grating string of the northern tongue seeped through the gaps in Gus’s teeth, but the interpreter could not bring himself to translate it and only fidgeted.

Flower did not understand the northern tongue, but he could tell easily enough that the words had been a stream of profanity.

“…So you struck him?”

“I held back.”

“Well, yes, I can see that — judging by the fact that his jawbone still has skin attached to it.”

“Do not tell my wife about that man’s remarks.”

What happened after that unfolded as abruptly as a mudslide in monsoon season. Flower had challenged Gus to a duel, for insulting him.

A duel.

It was not, in and of itself, a particularly rare occurrence. In truth, these were less genuine conflicts than a form of social entertainment, and the fine lords and ladies of this region were in the habit of invoking honor over trivial matters to issue challenges. For amusement, for a clash of pride, to impress the women, and so on.

Given that Gus had struck the host across the head in the middle of a daytime social gathering, no one could fault Flower for his course of action.

However… in practice it may be nothing more than entertainment, but in name it is a fight with honor on the line.

Aspara was a princess of the south.

Being the youngest princess of a southern nation was not, in truth, a particularly grand title. The southern archipelago contained more petty kingdoms than one could count on ten fingers.

A title about as powerless as “King of Barbarians of the north.”

No, there was one thing it meant.

That son of a bitch is picking a fight to manufacture a pretext for meddling in the north.

Yes, a title that was all name and no substance meant, by its very nature, that one bore an outsized responsibility without the power to match. If a man bearing the title of a foreign king were to injure a central kingdom official, no matter how much it was framed as sport, it would serve as ample pretext for future interference.