So Petty

A graze was all it had been, and still the shooting star had left the white collar scorched black. The robe was burned through in a rough circle; the cloth was fine even at a glance, and as though to prove it, the crest of the Great Temple was embroidered across its back in gold thread.

“Accident, is it.”

It sounded for all the world as though missing had been the accident.

“You’d be Hamel.”

For an answer, a band of what looked like kindled light formed around Hamel’s wrist. The bracelet turned with a droning hum, fierce enough to sting the eyes.

But Kashen did not so much as blink; when he spoke, his voice was empty of feeling.

“I am Kashen Altad, Inquisitor. There are a few questions I mean to ask.”

“Now’s a bad time.”

“You have no choice.”

“Ten minutes.”

Hamel snapped his fingers, and black smoke rose into the air and took the shape of a clock. It was ten minutes to twelve.

“I’m not the type of teacher who finishes early, see.”

“…”

— Baaang!

“Gyack!”

The second hand had barely moved a notch when a childish scream came with the sound of an explosion. Then a gale rolled in like a wave, clawed past under their feet, and was gone.

Kashen threw a glance at the author of the small commotion. A blonde-haired girl was hopping about, a magic staff half blown away in her hands. Beside her, a fine-featured knight with her hair bound up high in a single tail was soothing the child.

Kashen folded his arms where he stood and said,

“I will wait.”

A mage with a disciple in front of him was unlikely to bolt. And if he did run, that meant he had something on his conscience, which was grounds enough to detain him.

Patience is a virtue of the paladin.

“…”

But taking that clock at face value was where he went wrong.

Mm? It still hasn’t been ten minutes?

Ten minutes refused to feel anything like ten minutes, so he drew the pocket watch from his breast. It had already gone seven minutes past twelve.

“That damned…”

Irritation flared up in him and he crossed the drill ground in great strides. The mage was in the middle of explaining something to the young lady, and his face could not have been more serious. She nodded along hard.

Not that it concerned him. The ten minutes they had agreed on were up, and there was no need to accommodate the man any further.

But the knight standing beside them sensed him and turned. She was a beauty of quite extraordinary grace, and she closed the distance at a walk that was almost a run.

“Hello, Sir Knight.”

“…”

The softness of the voice threw him. Ordinarily a knight, woman though she might be, would have discipline seeping out of her very voice and her way of speaking. And yet.

“You’re the Inquisitor, Sir Kashen, aren’t you? I know your great renown well, having heard of it many times. It is truly an honor to meet you!”

She was so warmly attentive that Kashen felt a little of his irritation settle.

“Very well. And you would be…”

“Five minutes!”

The woman flung her hand wide open right under his nose and spoke in a pleading tone.

“Juuust five minutes. Please?”

“…”

After that, Kashen kept running into the woman just as he had begun to forget her. When he was taking light exercise at dawn after a fruitless interview with the uncooperative mage; on the road back from surveying the Black Forest and the Great Labyrinth; while making his rounds of the outer castle and the village beyond it.

‘Oh? It’s Sir Kashen. Good morning.’

‘Fancy meeting you in a place like this. What did you buy? The corner shop has better fish, you know.’

‘That’s right. I find exercising at this hour leaves me refreshed too.’

‘Wow, the Black Forest. I’ve never even been near it. The Paladin Order really is something!’

She was everywhere. And yet the moment he actually looked for her, she was nowhere in sight. Several times over, she would run into him by chance, strike up a chat with tremendous friendliness, and disappear like the wind.

Having an informant well disposed toward our side is no bad thing.

Kashen settled on that much, and so her loitering about struck him as neither a nuisance nor, for that matter, anything to welcome.

But running into her coming and going had left a certain familiarity attached to him without his noticing. Why else would he have taken her for one more of the knights guarding the young lady, and then shuddered with a strange sense of betrayal on learning she was that Regent Duke’s lover?

“So she wasn’t a knight.”

Come to think of it, she had never once properly volunteered her station or her affiliation. It took him a few beats even to realize she had never given her name. At that, every one of those frequent encounters turned suspicious.

Was she approaching me on purpose? And if so, why? Is there something to Keith Paragon after all?

But for a woman harboring an intention of any kind, their conversations had been thoroughly bland. What on earth did advice that the fish at that shop were cheaper and fresher than the fish at this one have to do with demons and their worshippers?

“Surely not to throw my reason and my judgment into disarray?”

One’s eye was drawn to her whether one meant it to or not; she was that beautiful. What if Keith Paragon was using his lover to obstruct the investigation?

She may not be his lover to begin with. Some interest of theirs may line up, and the pair of them may be deceiving everyone.

No conclusion came, and the hypotheses only went round and round. The one shred of certainty Kashen had carried from before he ever came to the White Castle was that there was something to Keith Paragon.

Because while tracing the years Paragon had spent as a slave, he had learned of his illness. There were stories that he walked about at night like a corpse with his eyes shut, that he saw what others could not see and heard what others could not hear. His mother had worked to hide the child’s illness and the slaves who lived alongside him had kept it quiet, but a peculiar constitution like that will leak out of somebody’s mouth even ten years on.

“Paragon…”

Kashen rubbed his jaw and called for his squire. Tomasi came running at once.

“Yes, Sir Kashen.”

“You’ll need to get me a drug.”

“Yes sir. What drug would that be, sir?”

Instead of answering, Kashen wrote something in the corner of the report.

Ten days had passed since the Inquisitor arrived at the White Castle.

In all that time Keith had not once invited Kashen to the evening banquet. He meant, perhaps, to make plain that the meals provided would not be shabby but that sitting at the same table was another matter. It even seemed he intended not to exchange a word until the investigation was finished.

With Keith coming out that way, Kashen for his part made a show of being ready to settle in for life.

“Grown men who look as though they could beat a bear to death barehanded, and here they are being so petty.”

Keith could not afford to have his being a half-demon found out, so his refusal was fair enough, but Kashen was persistent to the point of tedium. He badgered the staff into giving him testimony about the White Castle and Keith, and turned over every room in the castle as though hunting rats. Scarcely a day went by without his applying to Keith for an audience, and when it was dismissed he pestered Bishe to be told the reason.

He wore the face of a man prepared, if the evidence he wanted did not turn up, to manufacture it.

“If the two of them can’t stand each other they should just settle it with one round of fists and… ah! Anna, b-breath!”

“Breathe in.”

“Hk…!”

Anna hauled the waist cords tight with every ounce of strength she had, and the dress, which had hung broad and shapeless, drew in trim against Pai’s body.

“Mmm, pretty. How nice it would be if you wore skirts instead of trousers the rest of the time, too.”

She clicked her tongue as though it were a great shame. The dress was no ball gown, only the demure sort noblewomen wore day to day, but if anything its plainness set off the vivid cast of Pai’s face.

Pai twisted her lips, feeling needlessly awkward.

“I can’t, when there’s no telling where the young lady will bolt off to. There’s a saying about the hateful seven-year-old, isn’t there.”¹

“Mareni looked after the young lady perfectly well in a skirt, you know.”

“That’ll have been because the young lady wasn’t seven back then, I suppose.”

Pai was to attend the banquet as the Regent Duke’s lover and grace the occasion. Though for all it was called a banquet, the intent seemed to be to press the man on when he was going to clear off out of Keith’s domain.

“I-I’ll do my hair!”

“You’re going to tie it all up in one drab tail again, aren’t you.”

“What’s wrong with a ponytail? I’ll just—”

“Hands off.”

“…Yes ma’am.”

Pai gazed blankly at the woman in the mirror turning into someone unfamiliar. In the previous life there had never once been occasion to be scrubbed clean and buffed up like this, so only now did she learn that being done up in finery was work produced by the labor of skilled craftsmen.

“There, done. Ah, you really are pretty. Oh, so pretty. Ah, marvelous!”

At the sight of Anna so full of pride, the tension went out of her mouth of its own accord.

Anna slapped Pai on the back and cried out,

“With looks like that the whole world’s at your feet. Off you go, Pai. Go and seduce the lot of them!”

To be told to seduce an Inquisitor was about as irreverent as a thing could get, but Pai nodded with a scheming smile.

Because she was already doing it!

He’s gone suddenly cold these last few days. Ignoring my greetings and everything.

Had the bait not been enough? Then she need only scatter more.

Today I seduce him, no matter what.

Pai clenched her fist and steeled her resolve.