Diamond Crown (1)

The road leading to Haime, the symbol of luxury where the imperial capital’s nobles had their villas lined up.

A single carriage was rolling along the well-maintained road.

The carriage itself was small and gave a modest impression.

But a closer look at its details showed that no small sum had been spent on it.

On the driver’s seat of the carriage sat a woman wearing a light cloak.

“Hyah!”

The carriage driven by the woman on the box seat—Katrina—had not come from the direction of the imperial capital.

Katrina’s carriage had come by way of the coastal cities.

It was the aftereffect of Tessen’s western border having been closed.

From the Western Continent, Katrina had taken a ship, stopped over at Lirin-Sellen, and then returned to the Eastern Continent.

Her diligently pressing carriage entered Haime’s main boulevard.

“It’s so quiet here.”

Katrina the perfumer was originally from the Rune Empire.

She had foreign blood, and her status had been insignificant.

When she had lived in the Empire, every single day had been dreadful.

Katrina had crossed the border in search of freedom.

Even on the Western Continent, she had been a stranger.

There, she had struggled just as hard as she had back home, but as a foreigner she had been able to make use of that advantage to learn certain skills.

From the age of twenty-two onward, Katrina never revealed her true homeland.

In the Empire, Katrina lived as a perfumer from the Western Continent.

On the Western Continent, she was known as a merchant-guild master from the Empire.

She spent a third of each year in Baden, a third in her manor on the Western Continent, and a third in seclusion.

When she was hiding herself away, Katrina did not dress up at all.

She traveled alone and drove her carriage herself.

Her years of shuttling between the Eastern and Western Continents had given her the strength to protect her own life.

At this time, she was heading to her hometown, Haime.

Katrina’s real birthplace had been the slums of Haime.

But now, Katrina lived a life where she owned a respectable villa in Haime’s upscale residential district.

It was the sort of thing that would have made the people of her true hometown fall over in shock if they saw it.

Though she came and went from Haime every year, Katrina had never once seen anyone from her real old neighborhood.

Her pitiful former neighbors had likely died after hard lives, or were still being crushed by such harsh living that they had no reason ever to come out to the main boulevard.

“Excuse me, madam!”

A shabbily dressed woman dashed out in front of Katrina’s carriage.

It was a face she did not recognize.

Even if Haime’s prestige had waned compared to the past, hidden villas of nobles from the imperial capital still lined this boulevard.

It was not the sort of place where someone dressed like that would be wandering about.

Katrina did not so much as blink at the unfamiliar face.

“Out of the way!”

Katrina simply drove on, steering the carriage around the woman blocking her path.

“Kyaa! Madam, please stop!”

At the woman’s cry, Katrina snorted.

But it seemed that those pathetic-sounding words had been some kind of signal.

Clop, clop.

Two carriages drew up alongside Katrina’s still-speeding carriage.

They did not merely come close; they moved as if to ram her carriage and wreck it.

She had a bad feeling.

“Hyah!”

Seeing the carriages pressing in from both sides, Katrina urged her horse on.

It was no time to worry about the cargo loaded in the carriage.

As if to prove her foreboding right, assassins in black clung to the windows of the carriages on either side and revealed themselves.

“…Wh-who are you!”

The assassins did not answer Katrina’s shout.

Her life had not been an easy one, but neither had she lived a life that ought to earn her assassins.

Whoosh.

A sharp blade sliced through the air, rushing at her terrified face.

I’m going to die.

Katrina sensed that her life—short if you called it short, long if you called it long—had come to an end.

Even while thinking it was all over, she could not stop driving the horse and fleeing.

Clatter, clatter.

Each time the carriage jounced wildly, a loud noise rang out.

Clang!

In that instant, a thrown blade flew in from somewhere and struck the assassin’s sword.

Several more of those blades followed, piercing the assassin’s body.

The assassins who had been threatening her on both sides were struck by the blades at the same time and fell to the ground.

The drivers of the two carriages hastily whipped their horses to pull away, but it was a meaningless act.

The fallen assassins rolled far away, and dozens more blades shot toward the drivers as well.

“Hyah, hyah!”

Katrina panted for breath and focused only on driving the horse.

At first, during her flight, she had thought herself lucky that the blades were somehow missing her.

But when both assassins’ carriages were ruined and no more blades came flying, she realized that someone had been helping her.

Riders on horseback drew up beside Katrina’s carriage as it raced along the lonely road.

“Master Katrina.”

Katrina assumed they were the ones who had thrown the blades.

“Wh-who are you?”

Katrina brought her carriage to a stop and looked at the people who had approached.

All of the riders had their faces covered with masks.

“Our apologies. We are a secret clan and cannot reveal our faces or our identities. There is someone else who sent us to you, Master Katrina.”

The clan’s leader was a girl with a surprisingly young voice.

Even though she had only her voice to go on, the girl inspired strong trust.

Katrina scolded herself for being flustered that the secret clan’s leader was a young girl.

Although she herself had lived a rough life, she felt ashamed to be surprised that the clan leader was a woman.

“That person is…”

Katrina, in the middle of speaking, faltered.

“Master Katrina.”

To the Empire’s nobles, a perfumer who filled gold-trimmed bottles with scent to sell was no more than a peddler.

They never acknowledged that such a person actually created fragrances or possessed a craft.

Only one person had ever addressed Katrina with even a token of elevated respect.

Alicia Rain.

As Katrina began to suspect something, the clan members clustered around her as if to shield her.

“Master Katrina, you understand that your life is under threat, don’t you? Will you come with us?”

“Very well.”

Katrina had no choice in the matter.

“We were not following you, our charge, Master Katrina, but the assassins who were coming to attack you. You truly do have many villas in Haime. With so little time, it was difficult to predict which of them would be attacked.”

Katrina had never been ashamed of her wealth.

Ever since her life had become comfortable, she had taken pride in her abundance.

But at this very moment, she felt ashamed that she had bought up practically every property put on the market in Haime.

“Do you know who sent the assassins after me?”

“We intend to find out from here on.”

Judith, her face hidden, answered lightly.

Katrina climbed down from her carriage, mounted a horse, and rode after the group, her expression hardening.

The place Judith’s party took Katrina to was one of her secret ateliers.

The red-roofed house was known only to Katrina and the Marchioness of Belz.

That secret workshop was up in flames.

Seeing the attacked workshop, Katrina neither wept nor screamed.

She dismounted and offered Judith a formal bow.

The manners Katrina had honed over long years of dealing with nobles were flawless.

“Master Lady, would you grant me the honor of meeting the one who sent you to me?”

Judith also dismounted.

“Master Katrina—that title is more than I deserve. This is a letter from the one who sent me to you. Please accept it. For the time being, we ask that you follow our instructions regarding your personal safety.”

Katrina accepted the letter Judith held out and bowed politely.

The waiting room in front of the birthing chamber was not large.

Busy footsteps went back and forth through the cramped space.

As someone paced a distance of not even ten steps over and over, everyone watched nervously.

Click.

The waiting-room door opened cautiously.

The chief attendant stood in the open doorway and gestured toward the room inside.

“Please come in.”

Only then did the Emperor’s feet, which had been pacing the short distance without rest, finally stop.

“You’re here.”

Reichardt and Alicia, entering the waiting room, spotted the Emperor and moved to bow.

The Emperor quickly waved a hand.

“Dispense with the formalities. This is no time for them—sit down first.”

As soon as they arrived in Baden, Reichardt and Alicia had answered the Emperor’s summons and come to the palace.

They had hurried because Pauline’s due date was near, but Tessen and the imperial capital were far apart.

On top of that, the twins had decided to come a few days early, so even though they had rushed, they had arrived only just in time.

Reichardt sat down with Alicia.

Once he saw the two of them seated, the Emperor once again began pacing the short distance back and forth.

“Your Majesty.”

Josephina spoke, barely smoothing out her furrowed brow.

“What is it, Josefi?”

Only members of the imperial family were in the waiting room.

The Emperor, Marquis Lennox, the Count of Istevna who was there as protector of the mother, Reichardt, and Alicia.

The Empress did not attend, as she was pregnant.

It seemed the mother’s own family had not yet arrived.

Josephina attended in place of her mother, who had gone to Lirin for a time.

“Your Majesty, your nephew or niece is being born—why are you, uncle, the one fretting so much?”

Josephina addressed the Emperor with blunt honesty.

Knowing her temperament, she probably wanted to speak even more directly, but she was restraining herself because her counterpart was the Emperor.

She spoke without hesitation and tapped the chair with her hand.

Josephina was, in effect, tapping the chair at the Emperor and telling him to sit.

No matter how frayed his nerves were, there was hardly anyone else in the world who would behave that way toward the Emperor.

If anyone else had tried it, they would probably have been dragged off and beheaded on the spot.

“Josephina, they’re twins. And it’s her first childbirth on top of that.”

The Emperor cherished his first niece, Josephina, very much.

He took her impertinent gestures as a matter of course and sat as she told him to.

“Stop wandering around making everyone nervous and just sit still, please.”

Josephina spoke curtly to her overly worried uncle.

“They’re twins…”

The Emperor tried to emphasize the dangers of twins and the difficulties of a first birth.

Josephina stared at the absolute ruler with cool, pale eyes.

“Says the man who’s never given birth to a child in his life.”

Her sulky tone could hardly have been more impudent.

“I may never have given birth myself, but—”

The Emperor remained stalwart.

“Yes, I know, I know. You’ve watched since the moment I was born. All of your nieces and nephews—my cousins—were born here in the palace. It’s not like you’re some kind of nephew collector, so what is this? Pauline wanted to set up the birthing room back at the Istevna estate, but you insisted on having it here—this is a real nuisance, Your Majesty.”

Josephina cut off the Emperor’s words and shot back at him.

As she finished, she scrunched up her face to make sure he understood just how much of a nuisance it was.

“Josephina, twins are—”

The Emperor did not so much as twitch an eyebrow at his niece’s reproach.

He started to speak again.

Josephina screwed up her whole face in a display of displeasure.

The two of them looked less like uncle and niece and more like an eldest brother and much younger sister.

Their looks were also strikingly similar.

Alicia could understand the Emperor’s worry over the twins.

While the Emperor spoke of twins and looked only at Josephina, Alicia thought of the twins and glanced at Reichardt.

She also sympathized with his concern over a first childbirth.

It was widely known that first deliveries often became difficult labors.

When the Emperor’s first child, Princess Dorothea, had been born, it had taken a full two days.

Unlike the murmurs in the waiting room, the birthing chamber itself was in urgent motion.

“Keep pushing! You’re doing very well!”

“The baby will be out soon!”