My Name Is

Ardine Paragon was resolute.

“Ari’s not going home.”

“…”

“And especially, Ari’s never going with a man she doesn’t know.”

Keith fidgeted, opening his mouth and closing it again. There was something novel and entertaining about the sight of the Mercenary King, a name that had spread far and wide for cruelty, floundering helplessly before a child no bigger than a chestnut.

“Ardine, I am… I am your uncle. Your father’s younger brother.”

“Uncle? Ari doesn’t have ‘one of those.’”

Ardine was a child who had arrived together with the spring, back when the water that had lain frozen all winter began to melt and new life pushed up out of the sodden ground. Keith remembered the newborn who had been half the length of his own forearm. Just how small must that heart have been? He had held the baby properly only once or twice, afraid a careless move might hurt her, yet he remembered the feel of that moment, the smell of it, the way it had made him feel, all of it, vividly.

I’ll be a good uncle to you.

I’ll give you the love your mother and father gave me.

That year, in early winter, an oracle came down upon Paragon. To keep that vow, he left the people he loved. So it was only natural that Ardine did not remember him. And even so, even so… there was no helping the ache of disappointment that rose in him.

“Ardine. I understand that I am a stranger to you, and that you cannot trust me. But… I can’t let you set out on a long road by yourself. The world is full of every kind of danger. So—”

“Then we just have to protect her.”

“Yes. So when you’re ready, we’ll try again, hm?”

Keith’s head whipped around.

“What did you just…”

Pai went on with a perfectly composed expression.

“If the world is too dangerous for a child to travel alone. Then we go along with her and protect the young lady, don’t we?”

“That will not do.”

“Why not?”

Keith wore the face of a man struck down by a comrade he had trusted. He added stiffly,

“This is… far too sudden. Everyone was alarmed when the young lady disappeared, and—”

“Enri’s going back to tell them, isn’t he? That we’ve found the young lady.”

“The funeral isn’t even over yet.”

“Officially, no. But in practice it’s finished once the cremation is finished, isn’t it?”

At that, Keith’s eyes narrowed.

“Did you not say you were an outsider and knew little about Northern funerals?”

“Even an outsider knows that much.”

“Then why, earlier…”

“Because Count Luigi Husslix was being nasty.”

Keith’s jaw dropped at the bald phrasing.

Ardine, by contrast, had taken to the phrase completely. She said, cackling,

“That old geezer IS nasty.”

“He was a spectacle while His Grace Elrod’s will was being read out.”

“Ahem. What’s a ‘spectacle’?”

“It means so awful you can’t look at it with your eyes open, my lady.”

Ardine said that ‘spectacle’ was a really good word, and that she meant to be sure to memorize it. The two of them got on like a house on fire.

Keith grew uneasy. He’d had a sudden intuition that, at this rate, he might end up going all the way south to meet the nanny. On top of that, the clever child had worked out in no time who was ally and who was enemy, and had made Pai’s logic her own.

“Like Pai said, mister can just come with me.”

“…”

“If ‘you’ really are my ‘uncle,’ then you’d do that much for a niece you love.”

She even took it further. If he refused to come along, then he was no uncle at all and did not love his niece; he was demoted to just another good-for-nothing.

“…Hah.”

Unable to scold a child, Keith glared sidelong at Pai with a look of reproach.

Now what are you going to do?

What do you mean, what? We go with them, of course.

Pai signaled with her eyes, her face as easy as that of someone who had planned for things to turn out exactly this way from the very start. In any case, he could hardly tear the door off its hinges here and now and haul them back by force.

“…Let’s go as far as the midway village, for now.”

He scrubbed his face hard with his dry hands and set his hope-circuit spinning.

Once we reach the midway village, something will work out somehow.

— Rattle, clunk. Rattle…

— Clunk-clunk, rattle…

The young lady, who had carried out the runaway of her lifetime, fell asleep almost at once. She had slipped out of the castle without a soul knowing and moved as fast as she possibly could, so it was no wonder she was worn out.

Ardine had even, by her own account, ridden as far as the last village inside the inner walls hidden in a cargo wagon. She’d brought money enough, but no one would carry a child travelling alone, and so her plan had gone off course.

And yet it was precisely because the child’s grand plan had slipped that Pai and Keith had gotten their chance. More precisely, the situation had turned to Pai’s advantage. Her head had been throbbing at the prospect of persuading Keith within the mere handful of days it took to make the deceased’s jewel, and now she had bought herself a whole week.

Think, Pai. To get Keith Paragon installed in the White Castle…

“Mnn…”

Ardine, curled up like a shrimp, talked in her sleep.

“Nnnghh…”

Pai slid across to the opposite seat and gave the whimpering child her lap for a pillow. And so, in a carriage silent but for its rattling and jolting, a man and a woman ended up sitting face to face.

“Mareniii…”

“…”

“…Have you ever met Mareni yourself?”

Keith was the first to speak. He pitched his voice as low as it would go, out of consideration for the sleeping child.

“No. I came in after Mareni left her post.”

“I see.”

“Yes.”

— Clunk, clunk…

— Rattle-rattle…

“What was that business about ‘two o’clock in the afternoon’?”

“Sorry?”

“Earlier. You said, ‘Two o’clock tomorrow afternoon. If you want to meet the young lady, at that hour…’”

“Ah.”

She had said something of the sort.

Pai patted the child’s back slowly and answered in time with the rhythm, almost singing.

“Because that’s the hour the young lady ‘escapes.’”

“…Escapes?”

“Surely you didn’t really think a child that full of energy stayed shut in her room all day long?”

“…”

“You didn’t, did you?!”

“…”

“…How innocent you are!”

When she said it in a deliberately teasing way, Keith’s earlobes reddened.

And this is the Mercenary King!

He had earned a title that fearsome in the space of seven years, and yet he was innocence itself. Then again, judged purely on his features, he was simply a good-looking young man of twenty-seven. Not the bold, forceful sort, either; the kind of handsome that looked as though it had been drawn in delicate strokes with the tip of a fine brush.

What made him look like the Mercenary King was the aura, that rough, overwhelming presence that had seized the whole room in a single stroke the moment he flung the study door open and came bursting in. It would fall short of the height she had once climbed to, but with killing intent layered over it, even a well-drilled knight would go weak at the knees.

Of course, there was no need to pour out an aura in front of a little niece. Suppressing the urge to keep teasing him, she said,

“The only thing that can keep up with a child’s stamina is a baby doggie. Post one of your finest knights on her and he’d throw up both hands and both feet inside the hour.”

At her patter, the tension went out of shoulders that had been rigid with force, and Keith let slip a deflated laugh.

“You are saying that every day at two in the afternoon, Ardine escaped from that stifling room and went outside.”

“Yes.”

“But if she went in and out by the door, there’s no way that not one of the staff would have…”

Keith, realizing something, fell silent.

“Surely… it wasn’t by the door of her room…”

“A window can be counted as a door too, can’t it?”

“Impossible. The young lady’s room is on the second floor, so for a child on her own…”

Keith realized something all over again.

“Ardine was a mage.”

“Sorry?”

“If she knows how to use levitation magic, then coming down from a high place is as easy as eating cold soup.”

You were doing so well — why veer off on a tangent now!

Of course… of course Ardine had been born with a genius for magic. But that talent was no different from a diamond buried deep in the earth, and it would take a powerful trigger to bring it to the surface.

And that isn’t yet!

Regardless of all that, Keith, who had caught a mouse by walking backwards¹, grew a little excited, and his words came faster.

“Until now there has been only one mage in the whole Paragon house. Aki Paragon, the first Duke. She was an outstanding swordsman and a powerful mage at once, and she…”

“Yes, yes. That’s quite enough boasting about your ancestors. Magic would certainly be very dramatic, I’ll grant you. But Lady Ardine simply had one healthy, quick-footed accomplice, that’s all.”

— Gulp.

Keith, his words stopping dead, swallowed dryly.

“And who… would that be.”

“Before that, Lord Keith.”

“Yes.”

Pai peeled away a strand of hair stuck to the child’s round, milk-pale cheek and asked gently,

“Do you know my name?”

“…”

Keith coughed awkwardly, then hesitated and opened his mouth.

“Christina?”

“…”

“…That’s it. Elizabeth.”

How does he not get a single letter right.