Return.

Around that same hour, Ugli was in the middle of discussing a weasel-hunt plan with the castle lord. He had already sent the maid Star off to the incinerator, carrying the ruined stock.

“Jack?”

Jack had come padding up to them like a young sheepdog, only to falter mid-step. It was as if he had only just now noticed the large man standing beside Ugli and locked eyes with him.

Glancing up from below, he found Gus’s face more hardened than usual; it was plain as day that Gus still had no fondness for him.

“Ugl—!”

It was only after he had begun the word that Jack realized he couldn’t converse with Ugli in the southern tongue in front of Gus. He sucked in a sharp hk— of breath.

“What is your business.”

At Gus’s low voice, Jack shifted his weight awkwardly. He had already called out the name, which meant he had to say something, but he did not know what to offer in the northern tongue.

Watching Jack steal glance after glance his way from the corner of his eye, Ugli grew flustered too.

Unbothered by the two attendants’ tension, Gus looked down at Jack with the air of someone addressing a trivial matter and spoke.

“Is my wife well.”

Feeling sorry for the stiffly-frozen young knight, Gus had, in his own attempt at a kind gesture, inquired after her first.

Jack, however, had plunged into panic. Naturally. He had no way of knowing what had been said.

“Uh…”

Jack mumbled, lips twitching, and his sidelong glances in Ugli’s direction only grew more frequent.

Oh.

Don’t.

Ugli caught on in a flash.

This idiot — he isn’t about to try the ONE phrase he knows, is he.

Don’t. Don’t. Really, do not.

“It is none of your business.”

You absolute fool.

Ugli cautiously raised his eyes to check Gus’s complexion.

The man still had his expression muscles locked tight, but even without lifting his head all the way, it was obvious he was angry, no, pissed.

The face was impassive, but the angle of his eyebrows was drawing a sixty-degree arc.

First time I’ve seen him past forty-five outside a battlefield.

“It IS my business.”

Gus growled, low.

“Whose castle is this.”

“My lord, you know this fellow is an idiot. He can barely string a sentence together.”

Jack was darting his eyes about like a puppy that had just broken a flowerpot.

“I cannot teach him to speak. But I do know how to teach someone who has forgotten his place.”

“My lord!”

Ugli was flustered.

He had seen Gus lose his temper a handful of times back in their soldiering days. If a half-baked knight like Jack were “instructed” by him, he would genuinely die.

Gus himself had not yet let go of reason enough to forget that, and so, as a sign that he was swallowing his anger and giving Jack a chance to apologize now, he kept his arms crossed.

But whether it was nerve, or simply a failure to read the room, Jack, a bony stick of an idiot, put on an extra-strong face in front of the castle lord and stood there, bolt upright.

“My lord, it’s most likely some attendant business he’s come about. It’s about Lady Aspara, isn’t it, yes?”

Not understanding the words but catching the urgency, Jack nodded along, taking the cue.

“If that is the case, then it IS most certainly my business.”

“The thing is, actually…”

Ugli cast one glance around, then leaned in and whispered.

“I’m really not supposed to say this, you see…”

“Then why say it.”

“No, the thing is…”

Ssh— he drew breath in through his teeth, then spoke.

“My lady… asked that it be kept a secret from you, my lord. It isn’t anything bad.”

“…From me?”

“Truly, it’s a secret, so I cannot give you the details. Instead…”

As if to stress that he was about to divulge something he absolutely should not, Ugli paused for effect before continuing.

“You MUST, later on, pretend to be properly surprised, my lord!”

Gus glared into the face of his right-hand man, thought it over for a long moment, and then, all at once, as if taken by surprise, said:

“Huh.”

He drew in a breath until his chest swelled as thick as a log, as though to swallow his anger down, then exhaled heavily.

“…I shall pretend I did not hear it.”

Sensing that the crisis had passed for now, Ugli let out a long-held breath of his own.

“Then, with your leave, this lowly fellow will have a brief word with this other lowly fellow.”

The moment the castle lord nodded, Ugli seized Jack’s wrist, whipped around the corner of the corridor, and vanished.

“You lunatic — in front of the castle lord!”

“Then what was I supposed to do!”

“Who on earth says ‘It is none of your business’ to the face of the king of the barbarians!”

“It was an emergency!”

Smoothing his head with a sigh, Ugli asked.

“All right, what is it?”

“That… the purple flowers that went soggy. You’ve got more of those, right?”

“Those?”

Ugli thought of the useless, tattered pile of plant matter.

“What about them?”

“They’ve got a use after all, I’m telling you. Look at this.”

Jack rummaged in his pocket, and out tumbled acorns, a shed lizard skin, candy wrappers, and more. At last he opened his palm and spread it out: sitting there was something like a thumb-sized little bundle.

It was a scrap with only three rows of stitching, but it looked surprisingly sturdy.

“What is this.”

“Working title is Squishy Silk.”

“Whenever you have a kid, you’d better let somebody else name it.”

“You can name it, then. Anyway — look, isn’t it tough? I did this quickly by hand for now.”

Examining the scrap of cloth more closely, Ugli caught a familiar smell coming off it.

“Frostbloom herb?”

“That’s right!”

“This is… woven from the stem fibers? Fascinating.”

“Our lady found it! I know a thing or two about fabric, and this is incredible. We’ll have to test it more, but for lightness it beats cotton, for taste when you lick it, it beats leather, and it doesn’t burn easily and it’s tough.”

“The taste hardly matters, does it.”

Ugli pinched the tattered bit between two fingers and held it up close. That woman had stumbled onto a fluke like this?

Jack gave a couple of pats to Ugli’s furrowed-brow shoulder.

“Ugli?”

“Ah, right.”

“I think we need to talk to the storehouse keepers — help me out.”

Ugli brooded for a moment as if weighing something. He kept a bright smile on his face and fiddled with the little scrap.

Then, after several seconds of silence, he opened his mouth and said to Jack:

“I’ll take this to the castle lord and explain it myself, so you head to the incinerator. I’ll tell you what to say.”

Meanwhile, Aspara, straightening up her desk as she waited for her absent knight, came across the red letter she had tucked beneath a stack of documents, and was reading it through once again.

“Mm… reading it over, it’s unmistakable. This was written by Flower after all.”

Flop. Aspara collapsed into the plush chair as though throwing herself down.

When the seal at the bottom of the letter caught her eye, the day of the recent banquet came back to her all over again.

“Miss Seven did look rather happy, in her own way.”

As she rocked the chair with a creak, catching her breath in the gap, her stray thoughts wound all the way to her conversation with Sebinya, the one in which she had been pressed to make a baby.

“…Making one would be advantageous for survival, certainly.”

Aspara thought of the castle lord, and then, quickly, of the wedding night on which she had been refused.

Her thoughts ran on, one link pulling the next.

Wedding night. Refusal. Suspicion. Sweetheart. Interrogation. Jack’s sly, teasing lover.

Lover.

She had shoved the suspicion of Gus’s hidden lover into a back corner of her mind for a while; but ever since her thick-skinned exchange with her ex-husband Flower, it had only been gathering weight in her heart.

“Haa, what kind of idle thoughts are these, when I should be focused on business.”

Aspara skimmed the red letter again.

At first she had thought of tearing it up on the spot, but she had decided to keep it, in case Flower later crossed a line and it might make for useful evidence.

“Huh?”

Aspara carefully ran her fingers along the corner of the letter she had been turning over in her hands.

Something felt subtly off.

She kept handling the letter, turning the odd sensation over. When she rubbed the front and back of the paper between thumb and forefinger, she could feel that the grain was uniform across both sides.

“It’s too smooth.”

The back was supposed to be smooth and the front slightly rough, but both sides were perfectly smooth.

When she rubbed the corner with her fingers, the friction heat and the moisture of her hand began to make the paper part.

“Two thin sheets glued together.”

If he had put the rough sides facing outward, it would never have been caught; but to be so vain about paper quality that he tripped over it while trying to hide something. A very Flower sort of mistake.

Aspara used the tip of her fingernail to gently pry open the parted seam.

What revealed itself were faint ink blots. Some of the letters had been damaged where the paper tore, but the important content was roughly legible.

“What is this.”

[May the little bird return to its original nest. With love. ♡]

Beneath the line, flamboyantly written in cursive, three layered lilies had been drawn. It was a pattern that symbolized the god of fate and love.

“Ugh.”

At a sweetness sharp enough to make her fingertips curl, Aspara let out a tiny sound of horror.

Sending a letter with a hidden lily pattern to the one you pined for. It was a light little folk practice, closer to a child’s wishing-rite or a small prayer.

Her ex-husband had always been the sort of man who readily believed in superstitions and such. Although it might be closer to say he loved, not superstitions themselves, but his own image when he was drunk on romance.

And yet what was offensive was not the charm itself.

“Does this man genuinely believe he loves me.”

The symbol of the god of love, and the tiny heart drawn beside it. The bashful-boy-love-letter quality of it all was so creepy it made her skin crawl.

He truly takes himself for the hero of a romance novel, doesn’t he.

“Everything except ‘be kind’ and ‘apologize’ — he does it all.”

Aspara took the already tattered letter, folded it small and rough, and crumpled it into a ball.