Bound By Fate

Luigi saw red at the blunt derision.

“Why, you wretch…!”

“My lord, please, calm yourself…”

Another servant came running at the commotion and joined the first. Luigi thrashed and struggled for a while, then settled in the end for walking out on his own two feet.

Keith stepped into the room before Luigi had even cleared the corridor. The door still stood half open.

“Ahem… Pardon the intrusion.”

Pai murmured it under her breath as she slipped in after him. With the door shut, only the two of them remained in the study.

“It shames me that you should have had to see something so sordid.”

Keith said it as he settled himself at the walnut desk. The study was no different from a week ago, when the estate steward had read the will aloud; but now that the uninvited guests who once packed it were gone, the room felt far more comfortable and agreeable.

Pai clasped her hands behind her back and crossed the room slowly. To her right, bookcases ran the length of the wall on the scale of a small library. Their spines were almost all practical works, and she wondered whether these were merely the ones he reached for and consulted often.

As she turned her head to finish taking in the right-hand side, she found Keith gazing at her without pause.

“…”

He could simply have called me over.

Consideration? Or was he observing me?

Rather like keeping a well-trained dog, too.

She unclasped her hands.

“It’s quite all right. It was so gripping that I saw no reason to pay money for a play.”

“Are you fond of plays?”

“Art is a luxury for a poor wanderer. I couldn’t tell you whether I like it or not. And you, Lord Keith?”

“A vagrant mercenary is no closer to art, I’m afraid.”

“But for a child growing up by leaps and bounds, the closer the better, surely? Educationally speaking.”

Keith gave a soft smile and folded his arms on the desk.

“I do find myself thinking I did well to make a contract with you after all, Miss Pai.”

“The contract isn’t done yet. I’m to meet Miss Bishe in her office.”

“I know. I asked her leave beforehand. There is something over there I would like you to look at.”

Pai picked up the bundle of parchment he’d indicated with a jut of his chin. When she drew back the black cloth, the first thing to meet her eye looked to be a certificate of title. This was her own station, she realized. A forged title, in other words.

Isolated as the North was, and thinly peopled, Bishe was the only one on the White Castle’s staff who held a title of any kind. Even Mareni, the young lady’s nanny, had been a commoner, had she not?

Had she been taking on nothing but the nanny’s role, there would have been no call to go so far as forging a station. But she had to play Keith Paragon’s lover. Even setting aside Luigi Husslix’s carrying-on, there were those who found Keith Paragon’s investiture as Regent Duke hard to stomach. Some of them balked less at the legitimacy of his claim than at the plain fact that a man of twenty-seven had never once been married. That sliver of discontent could be put to rest if he brought home a woman of assured station, however obscure her house.

A commoner has no certificate to guarantee her station.

And so she had achieved a precipitous rise in the world (?).

“Viscountess Deluosa.”

Pai moved her lips and tongue slowly, trying the name out. The phonemes, the smallest units of language, tapped lightly against her teeth, and she liked the rhythm of it very much.

Keith asked, half-doubtful.

“Is it to your liking?”

“The name? Or the title?”

“Both.”

“Not much, either of them.”

Pai answered, sulking on purpose.

“The name is countrified and the title is paltry. And it isn’t even heritable.”

“Enri tells me you don’t strike him as a person who cares for power.”

“Would you tell him he’s misjudged me? I would like to be a duchess or a countess.”

“A marchioness, then?”

“The pronunciation is ugly.”

“Hm?”

“Duchess and countess have a good ring to them as words. Duchess, countess. Duchess, countess. Mm, countess would be better.”

She said it half-humming, and Keith answered with the clear face of a man whose headache had lifted.

“My apologies. I had only a viscountcy and a barony to hand.”

“And what was the barony’s name?”

“Girmo. The Girmo barony.”

“Heavens, Deluosa is a thousand times better.”

“I agree.”

Keith read her family name and her given name aloud together.

“Pai Deluosa.”

A name in which the tip of the tongue brushed the roof of the mouth once, and softly.

“This way is gentler. Like singing.”

“Like singing…”

Pai turned a few more leaves of the parchment, checking the documents, then covered them again with the cloth and handed the bundle to Keith.

Keith took another parchment from a drawer and spread it on the desk.

“This is the contract. Exactly as you went over it with Bishe yesterday.”

Pai nodded and leafed through it, reading in an unhurried, breezy sort of way, then held out her hand to Keith.

“I’ll sign.”

Keith handed her a fountain pen with a handsome blue feather set into it. As she took the barrel of the pen from him, her fingers brushed lightly against his hand.

It was a slight enough contact that a dull man would not have noticed it, but Keith felt a prickling sensation spread out toward his heart. He hid his hand below the desk and rubbed thumb and forefinger hard together to scrub the tickle away.

“Do you know it?”

Pai said it as she signed with a flourish, as though she had been Viscountess Deluosa from the very start.

“That old tale, that if you give someone your name, your fate gets bound up with theirs.”

“I have heard it.”

“Now Your Grace and I are bound by fate.”

Bound by fate.

It was the sort of phrase that might have sounded grandiose, and yet Keith did not dislike it. He only gave his head a short shake.

“Oh my. Does being bound to me displease you?”

“That isn’t it. Keith.”

“Yes?”

“Call me Keith. Not Your Grace.”

“…”

“And… I like it. Being bound to you.”

Oh.

The time left until the investiture was a fortnight. Now that the Regent Duke’s authority was already in force, the investiture amounted to nothing but outward show; still, going through the formality was the very thing that mattered. And so, as those hours drew nearer by the moment, Enri kept busy enough to bring sweat out on a dog’s paws.

Of everything, procuring the forged station was the easiest. Of course, ‘procured’ is a misnomer, since the title was one Keith already held. As Enri understood it, the viscountcy had been won some three years back on an utterly preposterous wager (the buying and selling of offices is illegal, of course. And what of it?), while the barony had come down from Baron Girmo a year ago. There were complicated circumstances behind that as well, but at any rate it is clear that due process was followed throughout. So it took less than a single night to turn a woman of uncertain origins and outstanding beauty into ‘Viscountess Deluosa’.

It would have been well if every last task could be handled sitting at a desk like that. But Keith had dispatched Enri in haste, as his proxy, to North Wind, the mercenary guild’s northern branch.

“Go and tell them I mean to lay down the captaincy of the Black Hawk.”

“It isn’t as though a mercenary company’s captaincy gets handed over by drawing lots, so do you really think you can quit just by saying ‘I quit’?”

“Probably not. Which is precisely why one has a capable adjutant, isn’t it.”

“…”

Enri truly did not want to go to the North Wind guild. He tried throwing a tantrum to make the Captain go himself, then tried begging him in tears, and neither was any use. And so the capable adjutant, in order to discharge his office, came to stand before Kalada, guild master of the North Wind.

“What is it you’re saying, exactly?”

A woman with long, curling black hair, her eyes heavily painted with deep purple pigment. Her voice was every bit as intense as the impression she made.

“You heard it perfectly well. He says he’s retiring.”

“On whose say-so?”

“On our Captain’s own, obviously…?”

“Some punk hasn’t been working an angle in the middle of it, has he?”

“Is there a punk in this world with that much nerve?”

As far as Enri knew, there was no man with the nerve to work an angle in front of Kalada, who was said to stop a crying child dead in its tracks.

But Kalada straightened her forefinger as though it were only natural and leveled it at Enri. It was exactly as though a dagger had been driven into his heart.

I’m a terrible matchup against Guild Master Kalada!

Hair standing on end, Enri shuddered from head to toe and railed back at her.

“That’s exactly why we used message magic as well! Because it was plain you’d never believe it like this!”

“Your acting’s improved a fair bit, hasn’t it?”

“Ugh, this is maddening.”

Kalada was the former captain of the Black Hawk, the company where Keith had spent some seven years, and the current head of the mercenary guild’s northern branch. She was called Kalada of the North Wind, after the guild’s name.

Propped on one elbow at a desk strewn with documents in wild disorder, she held herself loosely, as though drowsiness were creeping over her, and yet her eyes alone were piercingly bright. The dark brown lips curved strangely.

“He’s gone and got himself a woman, has he?”

Good grief. A woman’s intuition.