Guest.

Guest.

“Back then, she told me the same thing. That keeping an outside lover openly is a lesser infidelity than failing to love the one you’re with.”

“That sounds exactly like something a person openly keeping an outside lover would say.”

“She told me that loving someone — or not loving them — is a matter of will. That failing to love your own spouse is itself infidelity. Because you haven’t made the effort to love them.”

“I thought whether you love someone or not was something for the god of love to decide, not for circumstance.”

Jack pouted, visibly displeased.

“You’re one to talk. Didn’t you start liking someone the moment they confessed to you — a total stranger?”

“That’s different! And it wasn’t as though he was a total stranger!”

“You only knew what he looked like.”

“His face was more than persuasive enough.”

In the middle of their back-and-forth, the two of them came to a stop in front of an old but sturdy wooden door.

“Oh, is this your room?”

“It’s a little messy.”

“That’s all righ— wow.”

The instant the knight opened the door for her, Aspara let out a sound she had never made in her life. Jack was a little wounded.

“I apologize for the state of things.”

“No, no. If I think of it as a dirty room it’s unbearable, but if I think of it as a tidy garbage dump it’s perfectly tolerable.”

“Thank you for saying s— wait, don’t go rooting around in ther— ah! Don’t dig around back there!”

Aspara swept her eyes across the room, then began rummaging beneath Jack’s bed. With the smile of a woman whose suspicions had just been confirmed, she dragged out a square stack of baggage that had been piled under it.

“Operation ‘Love Through Effort.’”

“…Pardon?”

The bundle thudded down onto the bed, sending dust swirling into the air. The square pile turned out to be a stack of thin books. Each cover bore a slightly tacky illustration along with a remarkably varied range of titles.

“I thought I could just play at being a wife and get through it. But listening to Miss Seven talk, I came to a realization. What matters isn’t the actions — it’s the attitude.”

“Perhaps it’d be best not to take that woman’s words quite so seriously…”

“Do you know one of the reasons I don’t hold a grudge against her? It’s because she’s a hard worker. Day by day, she would go to my husband to talk with him, to offer him tea. Compared to me, holed up in my room every day, of course he chose her.”

Aspara gave a small nod to her own words and went on.

“And now? She’s over there spending hours talking with all those people just to grow close to them. The sheer degree of her effort is on a different level from mine.”

“My lady, it’s simply that the two of you have different temperaments. There are people in this world who actually recover their energy by talking to others.”

“Hoho, as if such a thing could exist. Truly, the girl who believed in unicorns until she was fourteen is just as adorable as ever.”

“…my lady, are extroverts even less believable to you than unicorns?”

Jack felt a prickle of foreboding. Yes, his mistress did not dislike the young lady with the long name. Despite everything that had happened.

She was a little uncomfortable around someone who was her exact opposite. And yet, consciously — or unconsciously — Aspara seemed to admire that woman quite deeply. Whether it was a defense mechanism to convince herself that her ex-husband’s affair had been justified, or simply that a woman who didn’t much like herself had come to admire someone completely unlike her, was more than he could say.

What he did know was this: his mistress, when she spent too long around the long-named young lady, tended to be influenced in ways that weren’t entirely healthy.

Even on an ordinary day she sometimes goes off without warning… but when that woman’s involved, even the direction she’ll go off in becomes impossible to predict.

“…But then, I don’t really know the first thing about romance. You’ll help me, won’t you? Now — what sort of effort does one make in order to fall in love?”

“That’s something I… no, the novels I read are about going on adventures to marry the person you love, not about trying to fall in love with someone you’re already married to.”

“My, these aren’t movable-type printed — they’ve been copied out by hand. How much do these go for?”

Aspara, caught up in the gaudy covers and titles of these lowbrow novels she’d never encountered before in her life, was no longer paying attention to her knight.

“A. Black. Knight. And. His. Lord’s. Wife. In. A. Passionate—”

“Please don’t read it aloud!!”

Jack reflexively swatted the book out of Aspara’s hands.

“And please don’t get the wrong idea! That one’s Volmo’s!!”

“It’s all right. I’m the sort of person who can at least distinguish fiction from reality.”

“I’m telling you, it really isn’t mine!!”

Aspara began rifling through the paper stack again, searching for a book that might prove more useful to her current situation.

“This one seems the most sensible of the lot. The. World’s. Strongest. Legendary. Knight. Reincarnated. As. A. Lowly. Frontier. Knight… is there a reason the titles are this long? Oh my, the man on the cover is quite handsome. Is that a portrait of the author?”

“No…”

“Then perhaps the editor.”

Jack, unable to bring himself to stop his mistress, lay on his side across the bed with both hands covering his face.

“The. Knight. Alexia. Was. Adored. By. Every. Sovereign. And. Every. Woman. In. The. Empire. And. Yet. He. Himself. Remained. An. Aloof. Man. Who. Took. No. Notice. Of. This. Popularity…”

“Please, please don’t read it out loud…”

“No, I have to read. Truthfully, I felt it on the festival day as well. Even that cold-blooded-looking castle lord was doing his utmost to accommodate a woman he didn’t even particularly like. I’ve been far too complacent… The relationship between a royal couple is tied to the morale of the nation. I’d assumed my duties amounted to sharing a bed and producing an heir, but it seems that was not the case.”

Aspara nodded to herself and skimmed through the table of contents.

“He must want to appear flawless, at least in public. There will be three more public appearances before the people ahead of us, so I too must practice in earnest. If I can catch up to even three-tenths of Miss Seven…”

“Please don’t call dates ‘public appearances before the people.’”

“What else would I call them?”

With the air of a man resigning himself to everything, Jack righted himself and sat up on the bed. He rummaged through the pile of books and picked out the ones most likely to be of actual practical help, then handed them to Aspara.

“…But just so you know, the ‘Lord’s Wife’ series really is Volmo’s.”

“I said it was fine.”

Up on the upper loft of the carriage house, Gus was hard at work designing a draft banner to represent Fang Castle. He had laid a piece of ragged cloth torn from the ceiling over a flat board, and was now using the dust-fine soot scattered here and there through the storehouse to sketch out things like baby rabbits and flowers.

Ugli leaned against the railing with his chin propped in his hand, responding with nothing but listless answers on the rare occasions he was asked something like, “How about this?”

《…Good. So, shall it be one of these two?》

Ugli looked over the castle lord’s drawings and thought that, while a little on-the-nose, they were acceptable candidates. A boar and a flaming sword. Safe enough.

Pointing at the boar on the left, he said:

《I think the left is better.》

《Hmm, is that so?》

Gus nodded.

《Then I’ll go with the rabbit.》

《Excuse me?》

《Good. I’ll hand it off to the weaver tomorrow.》

《There aren’t any rabbits living in our country.》

Watching the castle lord quietly tidy up the finished drawings, Ugli spoke up. Brimming with self-satisfaction, the man was glossing right over his subordinate’s objection.

《Hold on a moment.》

《Then I suppose the lily of the valley on the right would be better.》

《Lilies of the valley don’t grow in our country either. And more to the point — wouldn’t it be better to get some advice before deciding?》

《Of course I intend to consult the weaver. A design using fewer colors is surely preferable.》

This was bad. Most of the workers within the castle walls didn’t voice objections to the castle lord. At this rate, Ugli had the distinct premonition that dignity, as a concept, was about to die on the national banner they’d be carrying for the next several decades.

《No, hold on. Um… wouldn’t it be better to ask someone who actually knows about banners? This is a tremendously important object, isn’t it?》

《Someone who knows about banners, you say.》

《Yes. Rather than asking someone inside the castle…》

《…You have a point.》

It would be only a few minutes later that Ugli came to regret this remark.

Jack and Volmo’s room had an unusually low ceiling and no windows. The first time Jack had seen this room, he’d thought the barbarians were tormenting him. In fact, he still thought so now. A room this dark and cramped!

The truth, however, was otherwise. The reason there were no windows was that the room sat deep inside the building, and the reason the ceiling was low was that the kitchen’s smoke vent ran through it. In other words, it was the warmest room on the first floor. It had been a gesture of consideration, after a fashion, gifted by Gus back before he had truly come to loathe Jack.

Inside that narrow, dim room, Aspara was now tearing through her fourth book.

“…Um, are you actually enjoying them? Penny romances have their own kind of implied conventions, you know, so reading that fast makes them a bit hard to follow… but if you read them knowing the conventions they’re really fun… if you’d just read them in the order I recommended, it would go better. Um, please read more carefully!”

Seeing his mistress flipping through the book he’d recommended at such a rapid pace, Jack fussed on and on.

“I am reading carefully. I’m a speed-reader.”