14. The Heir Of The House

“Come to think of it, who carried me all the way to my room?”

“Leo? His leg shouldn’t be healed yet.”

Eve shook her head.

“Then Elli, who can beat a bear to death?”

Eve didn’t answer that one. She just kept her eyes on the door, with a strange look on her face.

“…Don’t tell me Valerian was the one who brought me here?”

I was half joking, but her reply was short.

“What?”

The answer was missing its subject.

— Click. Click.

Footsteps were coming along the corridor, and they weren’t ordinary footsteps. Each one came with a sharp, frigid crack, as though someone were walking across a sheet of thin ice. By then the room had filled with the same blue butterflies I’d seen outside the window, dancing through the air.

The door finally opened, and there in the doorway stood a woman with long white hair fluttering loose.

…Yuki-onna?¹

For an instant, a Japanese yokai flashed through my head. Tall, long-haired, with skin so pale you couldn’t believe there was any blood under it. And hadn’t the yuki-onna of legend been beautiful enough to bewitch people? The woman in front of me was unrealistically beautiful in exactly that way, like a statue carved out of sharpened ice. It was a frigid, dangerous beauty that looked as though it could cut anything that came near, even a stray glance.

Of course, she wasn’t actually a yuki-onna. But I did know that face.

Eve, looking put out, told me who she was.

But the name I remembered was a different one.

Frost Empress — Seraphina.

The boss fight against Seraphina had been a special one, because you could only meet her in a quest that had nothing at all to do with House Arne. She never showed up in any of the storylines tied to the head of the house or to her brothers. You met her in the late game of the Empire’s main scenario, in Endless Nightmare: White Night, a quest that had driven countless players to despair. An entire band of the Empire’s most elite knights had fallen and become demons together, and Seraphina was their leader.

According to the lore, she’d chosen on her own, a very long time ago, to leave the house and head for the Empire. Without the house’s name behind her, she’d climbed to the post of Imperial Knight Commander on the strength of her own sword alone, and then, right there at the top, she’d undergone demonification and met a tragic end.

That was the official history as I knew it.

“…You are awake.”
“Yes. You finally come home after so long and carry me here yourself, Sister. How could I not sleep well?”

Seraphina’s brow twitched. She must have expected me to be startled by the return of the eldest daughter, gone from the house for so long, but I’d already known she was back.

“You’ve already greeted me, haven’t you.”
“Greeted?”

She was still feigning ignorance, so I brought up what had happened in the garden a few days ago.

“Back when I was running about doing this Running Crew thing of mine, weren’t you the one who put those servants in their place? The ones who didn’t know their station and were yapping at me?”

Those servants had ended up with laundry baskets over their heads, tripping and going sprawling in the most undignified ways. It had happened far too often to chalk up to mere stumbling, and the decisive evidence was that just before each of them went down, I’d spotted the faintest film of thin ice forming.

She wasn’t even trying to hide it — those blue butterflies of hers were a calling card from the start.

Yet there was a question I still couldn’t answer. Why had Seraphina come back? And why was she helping me?

As I said earlier, once she left the house, Seraphina was never supposed to return here a second time. Becoming the Empire’s Knight Commander, then undergoing demonification and delivering despair to the players: that was the fate fixed for her.

“You have business with me, I take it?”
“…I do.”

Short. Painfully short.

In person, Seraphina was every bit as relentlessly taciturn as her character had been in the game. Even in a standard boss fight, all she ever did was swing her sword, thoroughly, with no lines of dialogue beyond the occasional battle cry.

I couldn’t bear the awkward silence, so I asked,

“Would you care for something to drink?”

Seraphina answered with a single nod.

I swallowed a sigh and stood up. Watching her, it occurred to me that if I didn’t pull out a chair and invite her to sit, she’d stand there like a stone post all night. So I gestured her toward the chair and, with hands not quite used to the work, brewed black tea. The only sound in the silent room was the clinking of the teacup.

This is suffocating. Truly.

If Eve hadn’t been here, I might honestly have suffocated to death on this atmosphere.

Anyway, I held out the steaming teacup to Seraphina, wisps of vapor curling off it. She took it but didn’t bring it to her lips. She simply held it, brow slightly furrowed, and glared at the rising steam.

“Is something not to your liking?”

In place of an answer, Seraphina lightly touched her index finger to the cup.

— Pssssh.

A small, frigid sound rang out, and white frost spread rapidly from her fingertip across the surface of the cup. The steam vanished in an instant, and a thin sheet of ice began drifting on top of the red tea. Only then did her brow finally smooth out.

…So her aesthetic is committed, I see.

I stared blankly at the spectacle. Apparently the Frost Empress was an iced-drinks-or-die type, all the way down to the bone.

Neither of us said a word for the whole of our elegant tea time. At last the cup was empty, and with a faint clink it went back on its saucer. That hellish stretch, during which I couldn’t tell whether the tea was going down my throat or up my nose, was only just over, and now, finally, it was time to hear the main subject.

“So, what is it you wanted to say to me?”

Seraphina slowly raised her head and looked at me. Not a single emotion could be read in those blue eyes. Her lips parted.

“Arden.”
“Yes.”

“Take part in the succession contest.”
“…Excuse me?”

I doubted my own ears.

“I will be your guardian.”

This time, too, breaking the silence fell to me.

“Succession contest?”

I asked with feigned bewilderment, though to be fair, I was genuinely bewildered.

“Isn’t Brother Valerian the heir to the house?”

It was the obvious question. Every matter in the manor, major or minor, passed through Valerian for approval, and the servants and knights alike treated him as the next head of the house. And now, all of a sudden, a succession contest?

Don’t tell me.

Seraphina gave me the answer right away.

“The head of the house has not yet named anyone his official successor. No one.”

“Don’t tell me” had a way of grabbing you by the throat. Valerian was not the official heir.

For a moment I was at a loss for words, and then I asked her,

“As far as I know, Brother Valerian is already acting as the house’s proxy.”
“A proxy is merely a proxy. It has nothing to do with succession.”

Her answer came as fast as a machine’s: input a value, get the output the very next instant.

But no matter how I turned it over in my mind, there was no reason not to give Valerian the formal heir’s position. This was something even I hadn’t known, so I spoke carefully.

“Are you saying Brother Valerian has some disqualifying flaw?”
“The head of House Arne is not merely a ruler. To become the true master, one must pass three trials the house lays down.”

Again Seraphina answered as if she’d been waiting for it, and she held up three fingers.

“Strength of arms, wisdom, and one remaining trial… Pass all three, and one ascends to the position of official heir, a position no one can deny.”
“No one can deny it?”

Seraphina shook her head at my question.

“No one. Even if it does not please the head of the house.”
“…What?”
“Code of House Arne, Article 11. The moment one becomes the official heir, that position is absolute, and even the head of the house cannot strip away the qualification or kill the heir on the grounds of personal displeasure.”

It was a formidable clause, but it didn’t end there.

“A head of the house who fails to protect his heir is deemed to have lost his own qualification. He is stripped of his position and permanently expelled from House Arne. This is the law our house has upheld for several hundred years.”

There was nothing of the kind in the in-game history of House Arne. There, the position of head had always been close to a nomination system, and whichever child the current head most favored was the one who inherited.

Perhaps she read the question on my face, because Seraphina added bitterly,

“However, this law has long since become nothing more than words written on a page.”

Well, that did track. I’d never once heard of a house in the game where someone had become heir by passing a series of trials.

“It has already been over a hundred years since anyone last passed all three trials and became the official heir.”

Seraphina was two whole years older than Valerian, so in a sense you could call her the true eldest of the house. Perhaps that was why the quality of her information was on a different level entirely.

“For the last century, the heads of House Arne have not been those who passed the trials. They have merely been the ones the previous head chose to nominate… even the current head of the house is no exception.”

Even Kairon — the current head of the house — never passed those trials?

Then again, maybe that was the kind of privilege only an exam that difficult could bestow. Certainly, if I made it to that position, no one would be able to touch me. No, I would be the one with the power to handle the entire house however I pleased.

It was a hard proposal to turn down, which was exactly what made it not add up.

“Then that’s even stranger.”

I looked Seraphina squarely in the eye.

“Why me, of all people?”

“…”

“Or rather, why are you trying to keep Brother Valerian from becoming the heir?”
“Because it is dangerous if Valerian becomes the heir.”
“Dangerous?”
“Valerian changed a long time ago.”

So Seraphina had felt it too: the decisive moment when Valerian transformed, the inflection point I’d been trying to find. She didn’t put it in concrete terms, but she had already stopped trusting him.

Even so, that wasn’t reason enough for me to be the one to step forward.

“Sister, you are the Empire’s youngest Knight Commander. In strength of arms and in standing alike, you outstrip anyone in this house. Even Brother Valerian has to give ground to you.”

I gestured at my own sickly body, lying in the bed.

“So why put me forward, of all people, a man who could die any day now? If you want to set this house right, wouldn’t it be far surer and quicker to take the trials yourself, Sister?”

There’s a reason for the saying that you shouldn’t carelessly accept whatever someone hands you. Pop the most beautiful-looking rice cake thoughtlessly into your mouth, and of course it’ll choke you.

“I cannot.”

Seraphina’s expression twisted with a bitter tinge, and she ran her fingertips along the scabbard hanging at her hip. Painted clearly on it was the Empire’s symbol, two crossed swords and a golden laurel wreath.

“You cannot? Don’t tell me you’re going to say you lack the ability.”
“It is not a question of ability. It is a question of qualification.”
“Qualification?”
“The day I left for the Empire, I made an oath with the head of the house. In exchange for the freedom to leave the house… I swore that, even if I ever returned, I would never again covet the position of heir to House Arne.”

I stared at her dumbly. A bluebird that had spread its own wings and flown the cage, perhaps, could never return to that cage again.

I had the situation in hand now. I raised one corner of my mouth slightly and asked,

“Very well. So how exactly does this heir’s trial work?”

Seraphina looked taken aback for a moment, then said,

“Are you truly all right with this?”

She must have been preparing herself for me to refuse. It would’ve been a natural worry, since she was, after all, asking a sickly younger brother to shoulder the fate of an entire house.

I shrugged.

“With the Empire’s Knight Commander as my guardian, what’s there to be afraid of?”

At my joke, for the first time, a faint smile spread across the corner of Seraphina’s mouth.

— Sssssshk.

Before I could even react, thick, transparent ice crystals began rising and growing out of the floor, the walls and the ceiling. In a heartbeat, the space around me had become a vast dome of ice, perfectly cut off from the outside. Even the faint moonlight that had been seeping in through the window was blocked, and the only light left was the faint blue glow radiating from the ice walls themselves.

Co… cold.

Just then, one of the blue butterflies flitting through the air alighted gently on my shoulder. And then, as if by some lie, the chill that had been gnawing at my bones disappeared, and a soft, gentle warmth wrapped around my body.

“Whuh — huh?!”

Seraphina drew the sword from her hip and hurled it hard at me.

“Your training begins now.”