Invitation.

“But still…”

“Do this instead.”

When Aspara beckoned him closer, Jack pricked up his ears and leaned in.

She whispered her plan to him.

“You’re telling me to lie again… I’m never getting into heaven at this rate.”

“You don’t even have a religion.”

“Oh, does that mean I can’t get into heaven? Well, fine then — understood. Oh, and my lady.”

“Hm?”

Jack patted the small of his own back and grinned cheerfully.

“The scarf is adorable!”

Aspara turned her head and looked down at her own back.

At some point, a blue scarf had been fastened to the decorative sash at the back of her skirt, clumsily but neatly tied into a ribbon.

While the first-floor hall had moved on to a new topic of conversation, Flower had slipped quietly up to the second floor, where he was now seething with rage as he wiped down his soiled mouth.

He scrubbed at his damp chin with the expensive lace-trimmed sleeve of his jacket.

“Damn it!”

The plan had been perfect.

Challenge the barbarian king to a duel. That part had been easy enough. Picking a fight with a beast who loved to fight; what could be simpler?

If Gus won the duel, Flower would use his injuries as pretext, claim the “aggressive barbarian had deliberately harmed him beyond necessity,” and secure grounds for future interference in the northern castle.

If he himself won, he would earn prestige in society as the man who defeated the famed warrior-king, and score points with Aspara in the process.

But it had backfired spectacularly. Forget spinning public opinion; the humiliation he had suffered today needed to be hushed up as thoroughly as possible.

“Dirty, underhanded barbarian…!”

Flower was brimming with grievance.

Back when he had been married to Aspara, he had been writing a romance straight out of a novel with Sebinya Gobir. A love affair for the ages, brimming with thrill and passion!

Compared to Aspara, who was always quiet, always shut away in her room, practically invisible, the slightly dim but vivacious, dazzling Sebinya had been utterly lovable.

Aspara’s older brother, the second son of House Bel, had been the most ardent supporter of his love affair, and when evidence of Aspara’s infidelity was later uncovered, that same brother had even generously supplied the settlement money to facilitate a smooth divorce.

And yet, it was only after he had overcome all those hardships and society’s prejudice to finally marry Sebinya that he realized:

A woman who seduces a married man and pushes the affair all the way to marriage — doesn’t that actually make Sebinya a loose woman?

He had not given it a second thought when they were merely lovers, but taking a woman with such a warped moral compass as his wife felt, somehow, beneath his station. Once that thought had taken root, he could not shake the fear that Sebinya would betray him with another man, and the baby, too, began to feel as though it might not be his.

Come to think of it, Aspara — meek, unassertive, never wandering beyond the estate walls — might actually have been the more suitable wife all along.

Surely Aspara had been suffering up in the north, pining for him all this while. If she raised the child that had already been born, and he kept things with Sebinya at a casual fling, the way they had been before, everything would be perfect.

“Now that I think about it, I was supposed to take Aspara’s side and rescue her if those two got into a fight, but there doesn’t seem to be any sign of that happening.”

Being in this state made going back downstairs a bit awkward, so perhaps that was a small mercy.

That had been yet another plan of his.

Sebinya Gobir, who had been something like a friend to Aspara up until the divorce, had expressed her intention to invite her to this banquet. She wanted to reconnect with an old friend and mend the relationship, she said.

When Flower heard this, he swiftly pocketed a sheet of invitation stationery from Sebinya, paid a courtesy visit to his in-laws’ estate, and used their address to send a letter north.

Its contents were designed to stoke a fight between Aspara and Sebinya.

“When the legitimate wife and the villainess who drove her out finally meet again at a social gathering, a spectacular quarrel is the cliche, isn’t it?”

Flower pouted and gazed down at the first-floor hall, where there was not the slightest trace of a fight. Just then, a familiar silhouette caught his eye in the crowd.

He stopped a servant who was coming in with a change of clothes and asked:

“Hey — whose attendant is that snake-like fellow over there?”

“Oh, that one? That’s a man called Ugli, one of the party that came from the north, I believe.”

“Aspara’s attendant?”

“I doubt it. He doesn’t seem to speak anything but the barbarian tongue.”

“Is that so?”

Flower tilted his head.

“Strange — I feel like I’ve seen him somewhere before.”

There was probably no one across the twenty-three kingdoms of the south who would contest the fact that Jack was a useless knight.

And yet, if there was one thing he excelled at, it was spreading rumors in society. He had a certain talent for it.

He lacked tact but possessed sociability in abundance. With that disarmingly cute face of his and his peculiarly flippant way of speaking, he was adept at chattering away among the noblewomen.

“Have you heard? Well, you see—”

“Oh goodness, but Madam, you won’t believe it. So the thing is—”

“A friend of mine was saying—”

The false rumor his mistress had tasked him with went like this:

Aspara Bel has gone mad with jealousy.

She is nursing a vendetta and plotting to stab Sir Flower and Miss Seven the moment she catches them alone together; she was spotted lurking in the waiting room of Flower’s favorite entertainment hall; even Sebinya’s friends are on guard, and so on. In a cramped banquet hall, salacious gossip spreads in the blink of an eye.

The reason for planting the false rumor was simple.

“Spread the word exactly like that. If it’s a misunderstanding that can’t be cleared up anyway, better to let them misunderstand properly. At the very least, neither of them will try to involve me privately for the rest of the night.”

“Will anyone actually believe it? You’ve already exchanged greetings with Flower and everything.”

“Rumors don’t spread because they’re believable — they spread because people want to believe them.”

She no longer had the pride to care if people thought she still pined for Flower, or that she was a villainess, or anything of the sort.

In truth, when she had first received the invitation, she had tried to endure it with the thought of at least making some business connections here. But listening to the whispers from every corner, she had long since realized this was not a battlefield that afforded such opportunities.

“No one will come to pay their respects to me now, so let’s just eat and drink until the sun dips a little lower, then leave.”

“Already?”

“Yes. It was a pointless gathering from the start.”

The rumor seemed to have spread without a hitch.

Flower, who had reappeared downstairs with his mouth thoroughly wiped clean, both figuratively and literally, as though nothing had happened, caught her eye from time to time, but he did not approach Aspara. He merely kept glancing at the other guests and, now and then, at somewhere beyond the balcony.

The banquet ripened and time flowed on.

Before she knew it, the gentle background music had shifted into the strains of a polonaise.

The couples at the banquet began pairing off one by one, drifting onto the floor in light, graceful steps.

Aspara’s eyes met those of the man beside her. The hulking figure who had sat in silence next to her all evening had been stealing glances her way.

Gus.

“Do you want to dance?”

Aspara made the first move.

She still harbored a small knot of resentment over his unilateral decision to attend the banquet, but a mild buzz of alcohol pushed her forward.

“Who were you thinking of asking? If you don’t know the etiquette for an invitation, I can teach you.”

Gus flinched, then regarded Aspara with a cool gaze for several seconds. Soon his lips began to twitch, and he conveyed his words through the interpreter.

“He says: ‘The music here is unfamiliar to me, so I do not know any dances that would suit it.’”

“Does the north have its own dances?”

Curiosity piqued, Aspara extended her hand.

The fingertips were rounded and slender, but for a noblewoman, the calluses between the middle and index fingers of her right hand were remarkably thick.

“I’ve never had any talent for dancing, truth be told. I was always scolded for being half a beat behind on my steps, for not raising my arms high enough, for my sightlines being all wrong. In that case — if I was going to be chided for being slightly off anyway, wouldn’t it be more fun to shatter the mold entirely and dance however I please?”

Aspara seized Gus’s motionless hand.

After a moment’s hesitation, Gus took firm hold of his wife and lifted her lightly onto the tops of his feet.

The northerners don’t sweat easily, or so I’d heard, but the castle lord’s hands seem to run quite warm.

With Aspara perched on his feet, Gus began to move his legs with care.

A spin here, a long stride there; not graceful, but disciplined, and with a charm all its own.

Aspara looked up at her dance partner. He was so absorbed in his own footwork that he had no room to meet her eyes.

She could not tell whether his dancing was good or bad, since she had never seen anything like it, but it did not seem terribly skilled.

And yet — this is fun.

The world around her moved at the rhythm of his steps, and that was novel.

Whether it was the pleasant buzz of the drink or something else entirely, the stares of the audience, all watching in unison, felt, strangely, delightful.

A laugh burst from Aspara’s lips, a bright, involuntary “pfft.”

“We don’t match the music at all, do we.”

Gus’s pale skin had turned a faint shade of pink.

She had the feeling he said, Do you not like it?, and so Aspara shook her head from side to side.

“It’s a strange dance. So strange that I doubt anyone will ever speak to us again — which suits me just fine.”

The dance of the two, entirely at odds with the woodwind melody, spun in lazy circles around the edges of the hall.